PREMILLENNIALISM 



&©£T GE0RGE PRE STON MAINS 






Class _L_L______ 

Book_____ 

GoB#tN°_ 

CQKRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



OTHER BOOKS BY DR. MAINS 



CHRISTIANITY AND THE NEW AGE. 

SOME MORAL REASONS FOR BELIEF IN 
THE GODHOOD OF JESUS CHRIST. 

MODERN THOUGHT AND TRADITIONAL 
FAITH. 

FRANCIS ASBURY. 

RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE: ITS EVI- 
DENTIAL VALUE. 

JAMES M. BUCKLEY. 



Premillennialism 

Non-Scriptural 
Non-Historic 
Non-Scientific 
Non-Philosophical 



By 

GEORGE PRESTON MAINS 




THE ABINGDON PRESS 
NEW YORK CINCINNATI 






*>■ 



Copyright, 1920, by 
GEORGE PRESTON MAINS 



MAk 2G 1920 



©CU565273 



TO THE MEMORY OF 

CHARLES WESLEY GALLAGHER, D.D. 

MY COLLEGE CLASSMATE AND CHUM. SCHOLARLY, 
INTENSELY HUMAN, WHITE-SOULED, TOO NOBLE 
OF NATURE TO HARBOR A MEANNESS. BOUND TO 
ME BY A LIFELONG AND INTIMATE FRIENDSHIP, 
A VERY COMRADE OF MY SOUL, MY WORLD IS 
SADLY POORER FOR HIS ABSENCE, BUT 

I SHALL KNOW HIM WHEN WE MEET; 
AND WE SHALL SIT AT ENDLESS FEAST, 
ENJOYING EACH THE OTHER'S GOOD. 



CONTENTS 

chapter page 

Foreword 11 

I. The Doctrine Defined 13 

The Advent — Christ's different com- 
ings — Two millennial schools — Book 
of Revelation not a sufficient basis for 
a millennial doctrine — Webster's defi- 
nition — View of the early church — Of 
the Middle Ages — Premillennialism as 
defined by Joseph A. Seiss — Catholic 
Cyclopaedia — Assumed failure of present 
gospel methods — Many worthy Chris- 
tians hold to premillennialism — The 
two views irreconcilable — The real 
truth should be devoutly sought and 
vindicated. 

II. Apocalyptic Sources 24 

Millennialism based upon a single 
book — A task for the biblical historian 
— Discoveries by biblical scholarship — 
Eighteen apocalypses — Enoch — Charac- 
teristics of Apocalyptic literature — 
Christ taught in terms familiar to 
Jewish thought — Book of Revelation: 
its characteristics. 

HI. The Judgment of History 42 

What are we to think of the derivation 
of premillennialism from the book of 
Revelation? especially in view of the 
revelator's own statements? — Con- 
sensus of Christian thought must com- 

7 



8 CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

mand respect — Dr. Charles A. Briggs — 
Millennialism a persistent force — Incite- 
ment of the historic cataclysm — Bible 
conferences — Movement merits counter- 
action — Professor Snowden's test — His- 
tory has uniformly rebuked the date- 
makers — History is a supreme inter- 
preter. 

IV. Unscientifc Use of Scripture 56 

Literalism — Allegory versus literalism 
— Premillennialism fails to practice its 
own theory — Its unscientific selection 
of proof-texts — Fails to give due place 
to the lessons of the Advent — Anachro- 
nistic construction of Old Testament 
prophecy — Old Testament prophecy 
does not teach a second coming — Premil- 
lennialism violates approved methods 
of Bible study — The unity of the Bible 
is moral. 

V. Premillennialism Jewish : Not Chris- 
tian 71 

Old Testament a record of divine 
worth — Puts supreme emphasis upon 
ethical and spiritual motives as condi- 
tions of Jehovah's favor — Jewish con- 
ception of Messiah's kingdom materi- 
alistic — Christ's apostles only slowly 
emancipated from this view — Saint 
Paul first clearly to see the doing away 
of Jewish law and ceremonial — Epistle 
to the Hebrews written to enforce this 
one lesson — Professor Snowden quoted — 
Jerusalem, "capital of the millennial 
kingdom" — A strange harking back. 

VI. Antagonistic of Scientific Prophecy 84 
Antagonistic to science — The earth 
itself a storage-house for coming civili- 
zations — Richly contributory to man's 



CONTENTS 9 

CHAPTER PAGE 

cultural life — Science prophetic of a 
golden age to come — Time a factor in 
the fulfillment of scientific prophecy — 
Scope to be given for the development 
of all human faculties — The earth a 
training-school of the race for society 
and civilization. 

VII. A False Psychology of History ... 95 
The Bible unexplainable by materi- 
alistic literalism — Historic illustrations 
of nonliteral fulfillment of prophecy — 
Premillennialism gravely out of harmony 
with God's methods in redemption — 
Incurable badness of the age funda- 
mental to its theory — Its philosophy 
unfits men for normal living — History 
exalts Christ: Rome — Obstacles to 
Christ's triumph were seemingly insu- 
perable, but his triumph is historic — He 
still conquers — Present age scientific — 
It is wisdom to heed the teachings of 
history — The war — League of Nations — 
The present a rising era of world op- 
timism — The turmoil of the present 
world in God's hands. 

VIII. Christ's Kingdom: Its True Char- 
acter 113 

The kingdom spiritual — The phrase, 
"Kingdom of God" — Christ and Paul 
both invariably construed the kingdom 
as spiritual — Need of understanding 
Christ's environment as Teacher — The 
early Church mistaken concerning 
Christ's second coming — The kingdom 
nonpolitical and universal — Premillen- 
nialism fails to meet requirements of 
the spiritual kingdom — Man's Moral 
nature responsive counterpart to the 
Spirit's work— Premillennialism rates 
present spiritual order a failure — Insu- 



10 CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

perable objections inhere in the system 
itself — A local throne: some reflections 
on this scheme — Local habitation, fatal 
to Christ's contact with Believers — 
Premillennialism translocates Christ's 
kingdom to an obsolete Judaism — The 
present spiritual dispensation final. 

IX. Coordinated Factors of the King- 
dom 138 

The kingdom assimilative of all moral 
agencies — Utilizes all helpful factors — 
Chief defects of present social order 
grow out of human viciousness — Man's 
gregarious aptitudes, however, hold in 
themselves the prophecy of the final 
human brotherhood: human society is 
no accident — The kingdom utilizes the 
entire man: the paragon of animals — 
Divinity of the intellect — The Spirit 
will ethicize all human functions — God 
takes time for completing his kingdom 
among men — Davison — Bowne — Scien- 
tific knowledge: its place in kingdom 
construction. 

X. Apocalyptic Values 150 

The book of Revelation no authority 
for premillennialism — The book: Pre- 
eminently moral and prophetic in its 
teaching — Its relation to the canon; 
evidences its own inspiration — The 
author: his mind was creative; he was 
a vivid, loyal and heroic witness of 
the faith; a weird poet; a moral seer 
of highest order — The book is to be 
understood only in the light of its pur- 
pose: Its immediate purpose was to 
voice a supreme message of trust to 
persecuted saints; its enduring mission 
is to furnish a superlative tonic to the 
true spiritual worshiper of every age. 



FOREWORD 

The literature of the apostolic age viv- 
idly reflects a general expectation of 
Christ's early return to the world. His- 
tory proved an effectual extinguisher of 
this hope. The passing of several genera- 
tions of Christians without the physical 
reappearance of Christ seemed invincibly 
to attest that this conviction was clearly 
a misconception — a mistranslation of 
Christ's own teaching and purposes con- 
cerning his second advent. 

Premillennialism in Christian history has 
had a precarious tenure. During long pe- 
riods its voice was hardly audible. Then, 
again, it has come to a sporadic and out- 
spoken expression. The present seems to 
be marked as one of the periods of its most 
intense propagandism. Systematically, 
zealously, and apparently with strong finan- 
cial support, its directing adherents are, 
in its interests, conducting a searching and 
far-flung educational campaign throughout 
the country. 

11 



12 FOREWORD 

If the premillennial philosophy is sound, 
it will abide. If it is fundamentally false, it 
merits dissection and exposure. *I am 
among those who thoroughly believe that 
it represents a false and harmful philoso- 
phy of Christ's spiritual plans for the hu- 
man world, therefore have I written. 

Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, G. P. M. 
January, 1920. 



CHAPTER I 
THE DOCTRINE DEFINED 

Christ, in incarnate form, once visibly 
lived on the earth. He who was in the 
beginning with God, who was God, was 
made flesh and dwelt among men, and 
they beheld his glory, even as the Only- 
Begotten of the Father, full of grace and 
truth. "God was manifest in the flesh, 
justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, 
preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in 
the world, received up into glory." Noth- 
ing is historically more certain than that 
Christ, known throughout Christendom, 
in a distinctive and exclusive sense, as 
God's divine Son, once lived, wrought, 
taught, and died as a man. 

In the events of history and experience 
there is a sense in which it may be said, 
and in which it is frequently declared, that 
Christ may have many subsequent com- 
ings to the life of men. But in a sense dis- 
13 



14 PREMILLENNIALISM 

tinctive from all this, it is definitely fore- 
told that Christ is again to make a visible 
advent to the world, following which, and 
as its consequence, most phenomenal and 
universal changes will take place in human 
history. Concerning the fact of two dis- 
tinct and phenomenal advents of the Son 
of God to our human world, one of which 
has already taken place, and the other of 
which is still to occur, there is in a general 
sense no disagreement. 

So far as "millennialism" is concerned, 
there are two distinct schools of opinion 
holding widely divergent convictions as to 
the relative dates of Christ's final coming, 
also radically differing views as to the sig- 
nificance of such coming in its relations to 
the church and kingdom of God in the 
earth. These schools are designated by 
the terms "Premillennial" and "Postmil- 
lennial." This volume deals only with the 
former. The term "millennium" literally 
implies a time period of a thousand years. 
The one place in the Scriptures where this 
term is used in the sense of time-measure- 
ment is found in Revelation 20. 4-6. Con- 
cerning the significance of this term as 



THE DOCTRINE DEFINED 15 

used in Revelation, discussion will be re- 
served for a future chapter. 

In a general way, the term "millennium" 
has passed into use as a sentimental ex- 
pression of a good time to come in the 
Christian world. 

In this use it is much akin to the term 
"Messianic Kingdom" as employed in Ju- 
daic thought, or the "Golden Age" as in 
vogue both in pagan and Christian expres- 
sion. In the sense of a popular optimism 
for the Christian future of the world the 
term will hardly urge for itself the neces- 
sity of critical discussion. The one book 
in the Bible where the term is found is 
dominantly characterized by a tropical ex- 
pression of symbolism and figure. It 
seems a violation of the genius of the book 
itself to undertake its interpretation in 
forms of literal prose. This violation no- 
where appears more positively than in con- 
nection with the very term on which 
millennialists base their doctrine. We have 
only to literalize this term, and then place 
it parallel with the decisive trend of New 
Testament teaching concerning Christ's 
final coming, to discover that it stands 



16 PREMILLENNIALISM 

thus in irreconcilable conflict with the 
dominant trend of this teaching. In the 
minds of an overwhelming majority of 
biblical interpreters the unique and single 
setting of this term in the book of Revela- 
tion decides for it an utterly inadequate 
and unreliable basis on which to establish 
a distinctive school of Christian belief. 

The following summaries will suffice to 
familiarize the reader with the fundamental 
positions of premillennialism: 

Webster defines premillennialism as "The 
doctrine that the second coming of Christ 
precedes the millennium." I desire, so far 
as I am able, to give a perfectly fair and 
just statement of the fundamental posi- 
tions of premillennialism. This task is not 
easy, since among writers on premillennial- 
ism concerning many of its features there 
is not a coordinated unity of agreement. 

The prevalent view of the early church 
was that Christ would soon return in 
glorious power to the earth. Chiliasm, 
which taught that Christ would reign upon 
the earth for a thousand years, at the 
close of which would come the end of the 
world, appeared early in the Christian 



THE DOCTRINE DEFINED 17 

centuries. This doctrine was espoused by 
several of the eminent church fathers, but 
it seems never to have reached a con- 
trolling creedal hold upon the convictions 
of the church. The prevailing conception 
of the chiliastic kingdom was materialistic, 
sometimes grossly so, and by so much was 
most largely an inheritance from Jewish 
thought. Mostly through the powerful 
teachings and influence of Clement of 
Alexandria and of Origen, near the close 
of the second and in the earlier part of the 
third centuries, chiliasm was rendered a 
dead letter in the Eastern Church. Later, 
in the fourth century, Augustine so utterly 
silenced the doctrine in the Western 
Church that thereafter for a long period 
premillennialism was ranked as a heresy. 

In the Middle Ages, among some occa- 
sional mystical sects, there appeared a 
revival of millennialism. Following the 
Reformation, there also arose, especially 
among Anabaptists, a new advocacy of the 
doctrine. And so, down to the present, 
sporadically, here and there, there has 
sprung up an intense interest in premillen- 
nialism. It has been reserved, however, 



18 PREMILLENNIALISM 

for our own days to witness, especially in 
America, a new awakening of premillen- 
nialism as is evidenced by a wide and 
zealous propaganda which now urges its 
doctrines upon the popular thought. 

Desiring, as near as may be, to let pre- 
millennialism speak for itself, I quote at 
length, as follows, from Joseph A. Seiss, 
who ranks, as I suppose, among the lead- 
ing American expounders of the doctrine. 

(1) Christ Jesus, our adorable Redeemer, 
is to return to this world in great power 
and glory, as really and literally as he 
ascended up from it. 

(2) This advent of the Messiah will oc- 
cur before the general conversion of the 
world, while the man of sin still continues 
his abominations, while the earth is yet 
full of tyranny, war, infidelity, and blas- 
phemy, and consequently before what is 
called the millennium. 

(3) This coming of the Lord will not be 
to depopulate and annihilate the earth, 
but to judge, subdue, renew, and bless it. 

(4) In the period of his coming he will 
raise the holy from among the dead, trans- 
form the living that are waiting for him, 



THE DOCTRINE DEFINED 19 

judge them according to their works, re- 
ceive them up to himself in the clouds, 
and establish them in a glorious heavenly 
kingdom. 

(5) Christ will then also break down and 
destroy all present systems of government 
in church and state, burn up the great 
centers and powers of wickedness and usur- 
pation, shake the whole earth with terrific 
visitations for its sins, and subdue it to 
his own personal and eternal rule. 

(6) During these great and destructive 
commotions the Jewish race shall be mar- 
velously restored to the land of their 
fathers, brought to embrace Jesus as their 
Messiah and King, delivered from their 
enemies, placed at the head of the nations, 
and made the agents of unspeakable bless- 
ings to the world. 

(7) Christ will then reestablish the throne 
of his father David, exalt it in heavenly 
glory, make Mount Zion the seat of his di- 
vine empire, and, with the glorified saints as- 
sociated with him in his dominion, reign over 
the house of Jacob and over the world in a 
visible, sublime, and heavenly Christocracy 
for the period of a "thousand years." 



20 PREMILLENNIALISM 

(8) During this millennial reign, in which 
mankind is brought under a new dispensa- 
tion, Satan is to be bound and the world 
enjoy its long-expected sabbatic rest. 

(9) At the end of this millennial Sabbath 
the last rebellion shall be quashed, the 
wicked dead, who shall continue in Hades 
until that time, shall be raised and judged, 
and Satan, Death, Hades, and all antag- 
onism to good, delivered over to eternal 
destruction. 

(10) Under these wonderful administra- 
tions, the earth is to be entirely recovered 
from the effects of the fall, the excellence 
of God's righteous providence vindicated, 
the whole curse repealed, death swallowed 
up, and all the inhabitants of the world 
thenceforward forever restored to more 
than the full happiness, purity, and glory 
which Adam forfeited in Eden. 1 

The Catholic Cyclopaedia, which must be 
conceded as a very scholarly authority, 
describes tersely, as follows, the general 
attitude of premillennialism: The time will 
come, it says, when "Christ will return in 

1 For this epitome, as herein given, I am indebted to 
Dr. Henry C. Sheldon's History of Christian Doctrine. 



THE DOCTRINE DEFINED 21 

all his splendor to gather together the 
just, to annihilate hostile powers, and to 
found a glorious kingdom on earth for the 
enjoyment of the highest spiritual and ma- 
terial blessings: he himself will reign as 
its King, and all the just, including the 
saints recalled to life, will participate in 
it. At the close of this kingdom the saints 
will enter heaven with Christ, while the 
wicked, who also have been resurrected, 
will be condemned to eternal damnation." 
It is clear that this view, in many essen- 
tial features, quite excludes or reverses the 
teachings of postmillennialism. It says in 
effect that the kingdom of God is not yet 
in existence in the earth, nor will it be 
until Christ comes in visible and irresistilbe 
majesty to enthrone himself as King over 
men. The preaching of the gospel, as in 
vogue throughout the Christian centuries, 
is not designed to convert the world to 
Christianity, but is simply the testimony 
of a herald voice to notify all men of the 
coming kingdom, and thus to make them 
responsible subjects of the divine judgment. 
An obedient and elect few will be enrolled 
among the saints and citizens of the king- 



22 PREMILLENNIALISM 

dom, but such, in comparison with the 
great mass of mankind, will be exceptional, 
even as a few fortunate passengers rescued 
from a sinking ship. There is no sufficient 
moral or spiritual power in the agencies of 
the gospel, as now employed, either to 
turn back, or even to arrest, the present 
toboggan slide of the world toward perdi- 
tion. In spite of all that the gospel has 
done, or is now doing, the world will grow 
worse and worse until Christ comes visibly 
to establish, with Jerusalem as his head- 
quarters, a new reign over the earth. The 
essential features of this view will be dis- 
cussed more fully in subsequent chapters. 
Between the advocates and the op- 
ponents of this system, as thus presented, 
there are great and irreconcilable differ- 
ences. They are divided by the cleavage 
of a deep and impassable gulf. In passing, 
however, one fact should be duly empha- 
sized and allowed for, namely, the funda- 
mentally irreconcilable views are held 
tenaciously by equally sincere and devout 
Christian minds. Both classes of thinkers 
worship Christ as Master. Notwithstand- 
ing their divergent construction of his 



THE DOCTRINE DEFINED 23 

teaching, they equally give him a conse- 
crated and zealous following. The sifting 
of the controversy, then, upon its merits is 
not to be, and should not be, construed as 
an arraignment on either side of personal 
Christian character. If in the course of 
this discussion, then, there should appear 
here and there some caustic characteriza- 
tions of premillennialism, these are not to 
be interpreted as an impugnment of the 
Christian genuineness and sincerity of the 
many individuals holding this view, but 
as expressions which, in the judgment of 
the writer, utter a merited condemnation 
of the system itself. However, it should 
be neither minified nor disguised that the 
two views not only involve vastly different 
ideals for Christian work in the world but 
equally different motives and destinies for 
the kingdom of Christ among men. It is 
of vital importance, irrespective of the 
personal following of either, that the real 
truth should be faithfully disclosed and 
vindicated. It is under the prompting of 
such conviction that I am constrained to 
offer this little volume as a slight contri- 
bution to the larger discussion. 



CHAPTER II 
APOCALYPTIC SOURCES 

Millenniausm, as a distinct doctrine, 
and in any of its forms, is based upon a 
single book, and it may be said upon a 
single passage in this book, the book fa- 
miliarly known as the "Revelation by St. 
John." This book, throughout its struc- 
ture, is largely characterized by a highly 
wrought symbolism. As it lifts itself on 
the landscape of the New Testament it is 
unique, tempestuous, trumpet-voiced. It 
presents an astounding prophetic drama 
the scenes of which are enacted in three 
worlds — heaven, earth, and hell. 

It is to be said that to the biblical his- 
torian, until very recently, the develop- 
ment of religious thought through the long 
transition period between the closing of the 
Old Testament canon on to the full devel- 
opment of New Testament teaching has 
presented many exceedingly difficult ques- 
tions. It is a critical, and often a difficult, 
art to reproduce the thought processes 



APOCALYPTIC SOURCES 25 

which have put their stamp upon a given 
period. When the historian would trace 
the connections between one period and a 
period still later, it is his task to discover 
the creative thought which has shaped the 
intellectual life between the two. It has 
long been recognized among scholars that 
the New Testament world reveals in Jew- 
ish thought many theological views which 
seem to have been not at all, or at most 
very little, furnished by the Old Testa- 
ment itself. Such questions as personal 
immortality, resurrection from the dead, a 
future judgment, good and evil spirits 
without corporeity, a clearly developed 
doctrine of future punishment for sin — 
such and many other questions, concerning 
which the Old Testament was either silent 
or certainly indefinite, seemed to be com- 
monly domesticated in Jewish thought in 
the time of Christ. Of course all of these 
common convictions had a genesis and a 
history. But to the biblical student, until 
recently, the history of religious thought for 
the period between the closing of the Old 
and the introduction of the New Testament 
canon has been at best a barren territory. 



26 PREMILLENNIALISM 

It is a phenomenal and priceless achieve- 
ment of modern scholarship that, almost 
within our own generation, it has un- 
earthed and made available for us a rich 
literature which furnishes an unbroken 
connection of religious thought as between 
the Old and the New Testament periods. 
One demonstration furnished to us in this 
knowledge is that the religious habit and 
style of expression throughout this period 
was largely apocalyptic. Aside from a few 
and detached paragraphs here and there, 
the only apocalyptic writings of the Bible 
are found in Daniel, written in the second 
century B. C, and the book of Revela- 
tion, produced toward the close of the 
first century A. D. 

If these two books were the only apoca- 
lypses in our possession, we might still be 
a long way from a definite, or satisfactory, 
solution of their real significance. But the 
spade of the archaeologist and the inquisi- 
torial art of the translator have discovered 
to us no less than eighteen apocalypses as 
composed between the time of Daniel and 
the end of the third century A. D. This 
is not the place to enter into detailed dis- 



APOCALYPTIC SOURCES 27 

cussion of these wonderful discoveries, but 
a statement of a few facts is pertinent to 
our purpose. The book of Enoch, well 
known in New Testament times, and 
definitely quoted by Jude, is of typical 
and special interest. This book was re- 
cently discovered after having been lost to 
the world for a period of fifteen hundred 
years. As it gives practically the best 
historical memorials of the religious de- 
velopment of Judaism from B. C. 200 to 
A. D. 100, and especially of those phases 
of Jewish thought which entered as forma- 
tive forces into early Christian conceptions, 
its rediscovery is counted as of the utmost 
value. This book was counted by many 
devout minds in the early Christian era as 
divinely inspired. 

Some general characteristics of the apoc- 
alyptic literature so rife in the time of 
Christ, and of the apostolic age, are to be 
noted: 1 

1. Its delineations are, for the most 



*For a luminous setting forth of these characteristics, 
the reader is directed to the elaborate article "Apoca- 
lyptic Literature" in Hastings's Dictionary of Christ 
and the Gospels. 



28 PREMILLENNIALISM 

part, of a highly visionary type. The 
authors are seers who project upon their 
canvas large, vivid, and vital portraitures. 
The imagery is often fantastic and unreal 
as compared with the actual world. Sym- 
bolic figures, mixed organisms partaking of 
the parts and characteristics of different 
beasts, abound. Mystic numbers, as 7 and 
10, are frequently used. The scenes are 
stormy with conflicts and struggle, with 
the bitterness of debates and judgment 
assizes. Throes of earthquake, smoke of 
torment rising from the abyss, and even 
the stars of heaven tumbling from their 
orbits, are parts of the spectacular scenes. 
Sometimes the writers explain their mystic 
symbolism: but fully as often the sym- 
bolism itself seems used for the very pur- 
pose of disguising the meaning of the 
message. 

2. The apocalypses interest themselves 
mainly in two quite distinctive parts of 
divine action — the one relating to things 
ordinarily inscrutable to human thought, 
and therefore inaccessible to knowledge, as 
relating to the supramundane world; the 
other as to God's purposes for the present 



APOCALYPTIC SOURCES 29 

world and its inhabitants. The first part 
has much to do with the activities of an- 
gels, both good and bad, also with the 
secret processes of the great nature-forces, 
and with the original methods of creation. 
The second part deals with the entire 
moral history of the race from the entrance 
of sin with our first parents, staging the 
great scenes of Jewish history, then sweep- 
ing on to the final eschatology — the Mes- 
sianic age, the resurrection of the dead, 
the Judgment Day, and the end of the 
world. Upon these final and tragic scenes 
in human history the apocalypses stress 
themselves with an infinite interest, voicing 
themselves in a very hyperbole of vivid 
imagery. 

3. The apocalyptic writings are charac- 
terized by a marked expansion of angel- 
ology. In the biblical narratives angels 
are spoken of from a very early date, but 
from the period of the book of Daniel far 
on into the Christian ages there is a great 
enlargement of belief of a prevalence in 
the world of both good and evil spirits. 
During these ages the mysteries and awful 
powers of the unknown haunted alike em- 



30 PREMILLENNIALISM 

peror and slave. Early Christianity did 
not divest itself of the superstitious fears, 
then universally a terror to the pagan 
world, of vast populations of both good 
and evil spirits that thronged all the 
spaces surrounding human habitations. 
The devil and his angels were terrible 
realities, prevented from the entire de- 
struction of men only by the ceaseless 
forewarning of good spirits. It is not easy 
to measure the force and persistence of the 
popular belief in ghosts and evil spirits 
even to late ages in Christian history. As 
great a man as Martin Luther, throughout 
his entire lifetime, stood in dread of these 
satanic forces. To the wholesale peopling 
of the universe with these invisible person- 
alities, both good and evil, the apocalyptic 
literature made great contribution. 

4. Apocalypses are almost invariably 
pseudonymously written, the works being 
usually ascribed to names eminent in pre- 
vious religious history. Enoch, Moses, 
Elijah, men divinely translated out of the 
world, are favorite names for such assign- 
ment. Isaiah, Ezra, Baruch, and Daniel, 
as eminent in the Old Dispensation, are 



APOCALYPTIC SOURCES 31 

also names prominent in use. There were 
many reasons, some of which possibly do 
not now appear, why the real authors of 
these writings should have put them forth 
in the names of eminent men, men them- 
selves long dead when these writings were 
produced. We know as a matter of history 
that the custom was common. The canon 
of literary ethics which prevailed in that 
old world did not brand this custom as 
either criminal or disgraceful. For the 
custom itself, in case of the apocalyptic 
writers, there were at least two obviously 
probable motives: The one was to secure 
the most influential hearing for the mes- 
sage. The apocalyptic writer was always 
serious. He had a tragic message for a 
tragic age. If he should think he had a 
message which Enoch, translated long ago, 
might naturally have for the present 
troubled age, then he would feel free to 
put his prophecy in the mouth of Enoch, 
with the greater certainty thereby of se- 
curing a wide and authoritative hearing; 
but another, and commanding, reason for 
the pseudonymous signature was in the 
fact that the apocalypses were sent forth 



32 PREMILLENNIALISM 

as righteous and fiery philippics against 
the very powers of despotic wickedness. If 
the writers of these tracts had given their 
true signatures, they would thereby have 
exposed themselves to relentless persecu- 
tion and probably martyrdom. So, of all 
the apocalypses we know, that of the New 
Testament is the only one which even ap- 
pears to bear a true signature. 

5. The vital purpose of the apocalypse is 
to convey a message of optimism, a mes- 
sage of hope and of comfort, to peoples 
who are in dire necessity, who are passing 
through drastic crises of persecution and 
of suffering. "Tracts for Hard Times" is 
a fitting title which some writer has 
ascribed to these productions. In any 
event, they are usually appeals to peoples 
whose only refuge from present and over- 
whelming troubles could seem to appear 
only in an immediate intervention of God's 
power in their behalf. A supreme lesson 
to the saint is, that if needs be, it were 
infinitely better to die in the fiery furnace, 
or by the headsman's sword, than to be- 
tray the faith. The apocalypses deal with 
most tragic scenes of human experience, 



APOCALYPTIC SOURCES 33 

and their messages are forged in the white 
heats of the most intense emotions that 
ever can stir the human soul. 

6. In the apocalyptic view the present 
is always a bad age. It is without self- 
regenerating factors. Left to itself, it will 
wax worse and worse until the day of its 
final and complete bankruptcy. The 
apocalyptic prophecy for betterment looks 
alone to a divine and catastrophic inter- 
vention. In the phraseology of the old 
prophets there is to come a "great and 
terrible day of the Lord/' a day that shall 
flame with judgment-fires against the 
world, a day in which God, or Christ, shall 
be suddenly revealed in glory and majesty 
to assert a reign over human affairs. Not 
Milton, nor Dante, nor any inspired writer 
ever has penned an epic more startling, 
more awe-inspiring, than the Revelator's 
narrative of phenomena that shall charac- 
terize God's coming forth, sword in hand, 
to end a bad and incurable age, and by 
his almighty fiat to install a new redemp- 
tion and a new heritage for his chosen 
people. 

7. The Messiah, whether the illustrious 



34 PREMILLENNIALISM 

and invincible ruler descended from David, 
as in Jewish conception, or the glorified 
Christ, is the central and potent figure in 
the apocalyptic vision. He by his own 
might and majesty is to bring in the 
prophetic hope. 

8. The conception of a general Judgment 
Day was probably a development from an 
expression often on the lips of the old 
prophets— "The Day of the Lord." But 
the impressiveness of the judgment scene, 
as set forth in apocalyptic teaching, is 
something passing all ordinary imagina- 
tion. It is a day in which the wickedness 
of God's enemies, whether of devils, evil 
angels, or men, will be most spectacularly 
exposed. God, the Ancient of Days, high 
enthroned, and surrounded by myriads of 
angels, will pronounce irrevocable sentence 
against all evildoers throughout the uni- 
verse. The wicked of all classes shall be 
utterly overthrown, not annihilated, but 
doomed to a perpetually wretched exist- 
ence. In the apocalyptic picture generally 
the doom of God's enemies is drastic, 
hopeless, final, a doom of suffering without 
sympathy and without help. Of course, as 



APOCALYPTIC SOURCES 35 

over against the doom of the wicked, the 
righteous, upon resurrection, are rewarded 
with eternal life. The character of this life 
is not always definitely described. Some- 
times it is looked upon as a prolonged 
bodily life. Again, it is presented as a 
superior kind of life in another world. 

9. A new world-order is to be installed 
under the reign of the Messiah. The 
present world, which has been defiled by 
rebellion and sin against God, will violently 
pass away. The present material heavens 
and earth will be destroyed, and in their 
place will come a new heavens and a new 
earth in which shall dwell righteousness. 

Such are some of the characteristics of 
apocalyptic writings which sprang up 
numerously during a period of about four 
hundred years, a period to which the ad- 
vent of Christ was historically central. A 
review of this literature prepares us to 
appreciate the views of eschatology which 
were so common to Jewish thought at the 
time of Christ. It must be borne in mind 
that the early Christian views of last 
things were direct importations from Jew- 
ish thought. One cannot, for instance, 



36 PREMILLENNIALISM 

study Christ's own description of the last 
judgment, the quenchless fires of Gehenna, 
the parable of Dives and Lazarus, the pic- 
ture of the world's final ending, without 
the impression that he was addressing 
these vivid descriptions to a popular mind 
already familiar with their imagery. How- 
ever in all this we may finally interpret 
Christ, there seems little room to doubt 
that whenever he spoke, as he did rarely, 
of his own Messiahship; when he dis- 
coursed on final things; when he spoke, 
as he did frequently, of his own future 
kingdom — on all these things he invariably 
spoke in terms and figures of apocalyptic 
thought already domesticated in the com- 
mon mind. 

Of the abundant apocalyptic literature 
which we have noted, only two products 
finally found their way into the biblical 
canon — the book of Daniel and the book 
of Revelation. It is due to remember, 
however, that other of these apocalypses 
were held as inspired and sacred by many 
devout Jews. In any event, we need to 
have in view the entire background of this 
literature in order to a just appreciation 



APOCALYPTIC SOURCES 37 

of both Jewish and Christian apocalyptic 
thought. It must be duly stressed that the 
eschatology prevalent in the time of Christ 
was a Jewish rather than a Christian 
product. 

Turning our thought specifically to the 
"Revelation of St. John/ 5 the one apoca- 
lyptic book of the New Testament, we 
can but be impressed that it is intensely 
characterized by the kind of vision, sym- 
bolism, and mystery so common to the 
apocalyptic literature in general. This 
book is now doubtless better understood 
than ever before since its original writing. 
It is thought by some scholars that there 
are figures in it of Babylonish origin. 
There are doubtless several references in it 
to the Book of Enoch. But, whatever may 
be said concerning these sources, the 
sources of the book as a whole make it 
an Old Testament product. Westcott and 
Hort have told us that in the entire four 
hundred and four verses of the Apoca- 
lypse, there are about two hundred and 
sixty-five which contain Old Testament 
language, and about five hundred and 
fifty references are made in them to Old 



38 PREMILLENNIALISM 

Testament passages. There are forty-five 
references alone to the book of Daniel. 
The mind of the author was saturated 
through and through with Old Testament 
fact and symbolism. In this sense the 
book is not original. Its sources and 
imagery are all taken from previously 
prepared material. It must be emphasized, 
however, that the Revelator had a marked 
originality of his own. He treats with 
great independence and freedom the ma- 
terial which he works into his structure. 
He unhesitatingly adapts all previous facts 
and figures to the diagram of his own 
thought. His work as a whole is a match- 
less mosaic arranged with consummate ar- 
tistic power. While the scholar will tell us 
that the writer of Revelation was not an 
expert in Greek grammar, yet it must be 
conceded that he was a very prodigy in 
dramatic power. 

This Apocalypse was probably written in 
the reign of Domitian; it also probably 
reflects the previous atrocities committed 
against Christians under Nero. Domitian 
installed himself as a deity-emperor, de- 
manding worship from all his subjects. 



APOCALYPTIC SOURCES 39 

This assumption could but be regarded by 
the Christians as the extreme of blasphemy 
and wickedness. It precipitated an issue 
of most vital character as between a su- 
preme loyalty due to Jesus Christ and the 
false and blasphemous claims made by a 
wicked ruler. The penalty of disobedience 
to the claims of the emperor might be im- 
prisonment or death. On account of his 
outspoken loyalty to Christ, the writer of 
Revelation himself was doubtless a fellow 
sufferer with the saints. The very hour 
was tragic. The faith and courage of 
Christians were subjected to severest 
strain. They needed a very trumpet voice 
from heaven to inspire them with courage 
and endurance. The vision of the Revela- 
tor was filled with the tragedy and crash 
of a present crisis. He was not at all 
thinking of events so far away as the 
twentieth century of the Christian era. 
The mightiest concrete power on earth 
had arraigned itself against the sovereignty 
of Jesus Christ. The scourge of persecu- 
tion, of the dungeon, and of death was 
wielded for the very destruction of Chris- 
tianity from the earth. The Revelator, as 



40 PREMILLENNIALISM 

the rallyer and inspirer of Christian loy- 
alty, could be content with no mild meas- 
ures. It was an hour for action, intense 
action. The divinest destinies were in the 
balance. So, his message comes uttering 
itself in trumpet voices, in terms that 
flame as with the very lightnings of Sinai. 
Under a matchless symbolism he pro- 
claims the deific and absolute sovereignty 
of the glorified Christ. Christ is able to 
break the last seal from the book of mys- 
tery. He can chain the very prince of evil 
powers, and cast him helpless into the pit. 
Even Rome, the boasted mistress of the 
world, the arch prostitute that had de- 
bauched mankind, that had made the na- 
tions drunken with the wine of her forni- 
cation, he will slay as an evil beast. No 
power can stand against him. As against 
all opposition, he can work sure deliver- 
ance for his people. The present persecu- 
tion is a passing storm. But the saints 
who continue true to Christ he will lead 
forth to a heritage of victory, of security, 
of everlasting joy and blessedness, where 
he will be their God, and they shall be his 
people, and they shall go no more out 



APOCALYPTIC SOURCES 41 

from his presence for evermore. And this 
was the message of the Apocalypse of 
Saint John. It was staged amid the 
scenery of world-tragedies. It was set in 
coloring as vivid as the rainbow. Hyper- 
bole, of the first Oriental order, was freely 
used to send the stir and drive of the mes- 
sage into the hearts of those for whom it 
was spoken. One could no more reduce 
the Revelation of Saint John to literal, 
cold, and unemotional prose than he could 
pluck Orion from the constellations of the 
night. 

Now, throughout the remainder of our 
discussion one fact never to be lost sight 
of is that upon a short paragraph of three 
verses taken from this book of Revelation, 
a book confessedly of highly wrought sym- 
bolism and mystery, is based the literal 
doctrine of a millennium, a period through 
which Christ and his saints, at some time 
still dating in the future, shall physically 
reign for a thousand years upon the earth. 



CHAPTER III 

THE JUDGMENT OF HISTORY 

We have noted with interest the source 
on which a literal doctrine of a millennium 
is founded. Rationally, what is to be said, 
what conclusion is to be reached, on so 
marked a doctrine as thus educed? We 
are now living in the twentieth century of 
the Christian era. According to a very 
zealous, though limited, propaganda of the 
present, the millennium is still in the 
future. It may come in this twentieth, 
or perhaps not until some later, century. 
In any event, it cannot occur until at 
least many centuries have elapsed since 
the writing of the original prophecy. How 
are we to reconcile the millennial assump- 
tion with reference to the fulfillment of 
this prophecy with the frequent and re- 
peated declarations of the Revelator him- 
self? He is careful to speak of his predic- 
tion as something of immediate fulfillment. 
42 



JUDGMENT OF HISTORY 43 

In his earlier sentences he pronounces a 
blessing upon those who hear and heed 
his words, "for the time is at hand." To 
the angel of the church in Philadelphia he 
makes Christ say: "Behold, I come quickly; 
hold fast that which thou hast, that no 
man take thy crown/' In his closing para- 
graphs he says: "The Lord God of the 
holy prophets sent his angel to show unto 
his servant the things which must shortly 
be done." Then he records God as saying 
"Behold, I come quickly: blessed is he 
that keepeth the sayings of the prophecy 
of this book." As if in eager expectation 
of the immediate coming of Christ, he 
says: "Seal not the sayings of the prophecy 
of this book" — as though it would not be 
worth while — "for the time is at hand." 
And again: "Behold, I come quickly; and 
my reward is with me, to give to every 
man according as his work shall be." The 
final word which he puts into the lips of 
Christ is this: "Surely, I come quickly. 
Amen." To this the Revelator himself re- 
sponds: "Even, so, come, Lord Jesus." 
Surely, nothing could seem clearer than 
that the Revelator was discoursing upon 



44 PREMILLENNIALISM 

events which he regarded as of immediate 
fulfillment. 

We have seen, what seems to us fully 
convincing, that John's writing was called 
forth by a great crisis of persecution, the 
tragic scenes of which were raging around 
him at the very time in which he wrote. 
That the Revelator apparently should have 
been silent concerning the sorrows and 
tribulations of the saints in this crisis — 
sorrows and tribulations of which he him- 
self doubtless was an eyewitness and a 
sharer — and that he should have given 
himself in such an hour to the writing of a 
prophecy, the chief message of which was 
not for his fellow sufferers of the time, but 
for men twenty or more centuries away — 
this is an assumption which both logically 
and psychologically must be challenged as 
both irrational and inexplicable. This is a 
kind of interpretation which can be adopted 
and believed only by the hard-put-to-it 
special pleader. It is something to strike 
the unprejudiced mind as both preposter- 
ous and absurd. We may not juggle with 
our common sense. In the first place, it is 
a gross violation of all sound canons of 



JUDGMENT OF HISTORY 45 

linguistic interpretation to force a literal 
construction upon allegorical or highly 
colored symbolic statements. In the sec- 
ond place, if this literalizing method should 
be insisted upon as applied to the single 
passage found alone in the book of Revela- 
tion, it could only yield a result clearly 
and violently in conflict with other plain 
and direct eschatological teachings of the 
New Testament. If we treat the term 
"thousand years" in the book of Revela- 
tion as we are rationally compelled to 
treat many other of its figurative expres- 
sions, and instead of considering it as a 
time measurement, construe it as rep- 
resenting the idea of "completeness," we 
shall go far in relieving ourselves from an 
absurdity of interpretation. 

We are bound to pay some respect to 
the larger consensus of Christian thought. 
When all is said, it remains that the 
premillennial construction of the passage 
in question has, on the whole, made very 
little impression upon the sane thought of 
the church. Augustine was, perhaps, the 
mightiest of the church Fathers, He was 
a philosopher of the first rank. No man, 



46 PREMILLENNIALISM 

aside from Saint Paul, even if we should 
make him an exception, ever so influenced 
the theological thought of the ages. As 
early as the fifth century Augustine smote 
hip and thigh, well nigh to its death, the 
entire structure of premillennialism. Cal- 
vin was one of the most vigorous thinkers 
who ever stood on two feet. His logic 
had in it the quality of the Day of Judg- 
ment. He had no use for premillennialism. 
Not so much was known in his day about 
the Apocalypse as now. It is to be noted, 
however, that in his biblical comments, he 
gave the book of Revelation a wide berth. 
Dr. Frank C. Porter, late professor of 
biblical literature in Yale University, 
speaks of the special three verses in Reve- 
tion as "the fateful verses which have pro- 
duced one of the least useful chapters in 
the long history of Christian thought." 
William Newton Clarke, one of the most 
brilliant and spiritually discerning of mod- 
ern theologians, is convinced that the doc- 
trine of millennialism has no proper bibli- 
cal standing whatsoever. Such testimony 
might be well-nigh indefinitely multiplied. 
Among recent luminous writings on this 



JUDGMENT OF HISTORY 47 

subject, and all in convincing refutation of 
premillennialism, are works by Drs. George 
P. Eckman, Shirley Jackson Case, and 
James H. Snowden. 

A long-range view of Christian thought, 
while revealing many sporadic outbreaks 
of millennialism, shows clearly that the 
steady and controlling trend of the church 
has moved on independently of, and little 
influenced by, the special teachings of the 
cult. Dr. C. A. Briggs, a most eminent 
authority, as quoted by Professor James 
H. Snowden, says: "We find chiliasm" — 
millennialism — "in a few eminent men of 
the first half" — of the third — "century, all 
influenced by extra-biblical traditions from 
Asia Minor; but they made it prominent 
only to insure its overthrow — for the mass 
of writers, as well as churches, speaking 
through their local assemblies, bishops, and 
patriarchs, either show an entirely different 
conception of eschatology, or else, as in 
the great churches of Rome, Alexandria, 
and Asia Minor, they condemn the heresy; 
so that before the first Ecumenical Council 
of Nice, chiliasm had been virtually sup- 
pressed in all parts of the Christian 



48 PREMILLENNIALISM 

Church, and no one of that most august 
assembly of Christendom from all parts of 
the church has ever, so far as we know, 
been charged with the slightest taint of 
millenarianism." 

Dr. Briggs also, in an elaborate treat- 
ment of the historic creeds of the early 
church, clearly shows that they are none 
of them shaped by millennialistic doctrines. 
They all teach the simultaneous resurrec- 
tion of the wicked with the righteous, 
thereby excluding a very foundation of 
premillennialism. The same statement, in 
effect, may also be asserted concerning the 
great creeds of modern Protestantism. 

It cannot be said, however, that millen- 
nialism is an extinct faith. Like an under- 
ground water-course that comes to the 
surface here and there, millennialism has 
intermittently shown itself at various pe- 
riods through the centuries of Christian 
history. Its phenomena, while much the 
same at all times, have been excited into 
activity from time to time by varying 
causes. However few its numbers, it is 
always supported by an intense following. 
Its creed, in general, appeals more to the 



JUDGMENT OF HISTORY 49 

emotions than to reason, is made far more 
effective through a colored rhetoric than 
by the invincibilities of a sound logic. 
Among its adherents there would seem an 
undue proportion of persons whose credu- 
lity is far in excess of their ability to clearly 
discriminate between truth and error. But 
credulity and fanaticism are so akin as to 
be frequently found in close association. 
For instance, at different times during the 
nineteenth century there were no less than 
nine different sporadic outbreaks, and in 
widely sundered times and communities, of 
intense social excitement growing out of 
the expectation, in each case, of Christ's 
second appearing at given dates as respec- 
tively designated. Time and again people 
have clothed themselves in pure white, have 
gathered at the brinks of rivers, and have 
waited with outstretched hands and up- 
lifted vision for the immediate coming of 
the Lord in the clouds of heaven. In sup- 
port of views of which such phenomena 
have been a too frequent and pathetic 
fruitage several Adventist denominations 
have been founded, and are still main- 
tained. 



50 PREMILLENNIALISM 

A historic cataclysm seems sure to im- 
part a new impulse to premillennialism. It 
is accepted as a portent which precedes and 
forewarns the violent shaking of the earth, 
and the ending of the present order of 
human history. It is in keeping with this 
fact that the recent unpredecented world- 
war has evoked a marked revival among 
the people of this faith by inciting a new 
expectation of the imminent coming of 
Christ for the ending of the world. There 
have been some periods in the history of 
premillennialism marked by most unre- 
strained and fanatical excitement; but 
there probably never was in America a 
period marked by a more systematic, per- 
sistent, and even audacious propaganda of 
this faith, than is being widely urged at the 
present time. "Bible Conferences," nu- 
merous and widely distributed over the 
country, are being frequently conducted as 
free schools of the faith. These conferences 
are conducted by the most expert teachers 
and lecturers that can be imported for the 
purpose. It is a common rumor that for 
the support of this movement large endow- 
ments of money have been secured. The 



JUDGMENT OF HISTORY 51 

appeal is made to the masses of Christians 
in every community, and in many eases 
people are drawn under the influence of 
these meetings from the surrounding 
churches. The phenomena are not new. 
As in former cases, though perhaps now 
on a somewhat different scale, high expec- 
tations will be raised, the most startling 
predictions uttered, and many, some in 
ecstasy, some in fear, will look for the 
imminent and phenomenal coming of the 
Lord. 

The movement merits counteraction. If 
it be fundamentally false, it may be pro- 
ductive of serious damage. Its propaganda 
has behind it the soul of earnest leadership. 
The earnest agitator, often misled and mis- 
leading, is a person not always to be 
treated with indifference. If sincere, he 
needs instruction and persuasion. If vi- 
cious, he needs to feel the majesty of truth 
against which he arrays himself. Premil- 
lennialism is not a cult to be underesti- 
mated. The evident awaking of scholarly 
thought in these very days in refutation of 
premillennial positions is evidence itself of 
a growing conviction that the movement 



52 PREMILLENNIALISM 

no longer should be allowed to pass un- 
challenged. Its danger, however, is not at 
all that it shall in any measure unsettle, 
or even modify, the present solid consen- 
sus of Christian scholarship concerning its 
teachings. Its real danger is the hold 
which as a propaganda it may, by its per- 
sistent and plausible methods, secure upon 
the unlettered and good people of the 
Christian churches. It is this menace 
which should be zealously counteracted. 

Fully allowing for all present reenf orce- 
ments and renewed activities of the move- 
ment, there is no sort of danger of the 
sane scholarship of the church being seri- 
ously invaded by its claims. Its methods 
are in too exaggerated and gross violations 
of established creedal truth, too mechani- 
cal, too illogical, to make it at all possible 
that it should in any way disturb the as- 
sured solidity already reached by critical 
Christian thought. In real scholarship pre- 
millennialism will always prove a negligible 
quantity. Professor James H. Snowden, in 
a recent article in the Biblical World, tells 
us that in order to find out the attitude of 
biblical scholarship on the question, he 



JUDGMENT OF HISTORY 53 

applied for, and obtained official informa- 
tion on this point from twenty-seven lead- 
ing theological seminaries in eight denomi- 
nations, with the result that "out of the 
two hundred and thirty-six members of 
the faculties of these theological seminaries 
only eight are premillennialists." As show- 
ing the attitude of real scholarship in the 
situation, no more significant demonstra- 
tion could be asked than this. The scholar- 
ship of the church on the question is 
sound, and scholarship alone, as rightfully 
belongs to its province, will finally and 
triumphantly close the debate. 

Yet, a remarkable anomaly in the his- 
tory of thought has well-nigh continuously 
repeated itself in the persistent reiteration, 
straight in the face of all historic teaching 
to the contrary, of the imminent coming 
of Christ to end the present order of world- 
life. All through the centuries, from the 
days of Ignatius of Antioch to these later 
days of Pastor Russell, the premillennial 
hope, in some periods more pronounced, in 
some less so, has been in one form or 
another revived. In many instances and 
locations, intense popular interest has been 



54 PREMILLENNIALISM 

awakened, and definite dates set for the 
physical reappearing of Christ- But in 
every case, without the shadow of an ex- 
ception, history has rebuked this enthu- 
siasm, and has dealt with the date-makers 
in terms of stern and inflexible negation. 
After history, and in so many cases, has 
uniformly falsified all predictions as to the 
time of Christ's renewed bodily appearance 
in the world, it seems nothing less than an 
enigma that any man, or set of men, laying 
claim to ordinary intelligence, should still 
be found willing to lend support to this in- 
glorious succession of false prophecies. 

There is one supreme interpreter to 
which all open-minded thinkers will pay 
at least respectful attention — and this is 
History. It is to be admitted that in the 
early church there was a general and eager 
expectation of Christ's near return to the 
world. History declares with definiteness 
and emphasis that, in the sense in which 
this advent was expected, it was a mis- 
taken view. Even Saint Paul himself out- 
lived in his own case this view. When he 
wrote his first letter to the Thessalonians, 
he apparently shared the conviction that 



JUDGMENT OP HISTORY 55 

he himself would be alive on the earth at 
his Lord's appearing. Years later, when he 
wrote his letters to Timothy, he seemed 
fully to anticipate that he would die a 
martyr's death. If history teaches any- 
thing, it is that God's calendar of final 
events is not in the slightest measure 
regulated or controlled by any human 
jugglery of numerals. It may be accepted 
as axiomatic and indubitable, whatever 
temporary clamor or enthusiasm may cry 
out to the contrary, that any philosophy 
or theology which does not bear the final 
approval of history, is a system of thought 
not to be trusted. In the light of this 
infallible principle, a few of the succeeding 
chapters will be devoted to a discussion of 
some rational objections against the posi- 
tions of premillennialism. 



CHAPTER IV 

UNSCIENTIFIC USE OF SCRIPTURE 

The term "unscientific" in the title to 
this chapter is not used in any occult 
sense. It is simply intended to convey 
the idea of an unnatural, abnormal, and 
unjustifiable method in the use of the 
Scriptures. The premillennialist school in- 
sistently demands a literal interpretation 
of the Bible. A strict and universal appli- 
cation of literalism, however, to biblical 
interpretation has been found not only 
exceedingly difficult but impossible. The 
Bible is an Oriental book. The Occidental 
mind in its methods is much less imagina- 
tive than the Oriental mind. But even the 
more prosy Western thought employs for 
its expression all kinds of figurative speech 
— myth, legend, fable, parable, hyperbole, 
symbolism. All shades of poetical imagery 
have a legitimate and recognized function 
in our living literature and speech. But if 
all this is true in Occidental thought, it 
56 



USE OF SCRIPTURE 57 

proves immeasurably more so when we 
traverse the realm of Oriental expression. 
The Oriental mind thinks in pictures and 
in symbols. In the very nature of the 
case, it is not only utterably impracticable, 
but its attempt is absurd, to reduce to 
literal prose all the statements of the Bible. 

All this is infinitely removed from ar- 
raignment of the sanity of Scripture ex- 
pression. The Bible does not always mean 
what an obsession for plain prose construc- 
tion would call for. In its most symbolic 
utterance, however, it does convey its in- 
tended meaning to discerning insight. 
Under the garb of poetry and symbol it 
often conveys to us its intended message 
with far greater charm and vividness than 
would be pssoible in any setting of plain 
and naked prose. 

The history of biblical interpretation dis- 
closes two extremes of method — the alle- 
gorical and the literal — each of which is 
far removed from the normal line. For 
centuries many of the church Fathers sur- 
rendered themselves to the allegorical 
method. Prepossessed by their acquired 
philosophy and theology, they found it 



58 PREMILLENNIALISM 

impossible to reconcile the Scriptures, as 
literally construed, to their beliefs. As a 
consequence they resorted to methods of 
allegorical interpretation, forcing the Scrip- 
tures to mean anything that might be 
called for as harmonizing with their pre- 
conceived convictions. The extremes to 
which this method carried really great 
minds are an enigma and a marvel in the 
history of thought. Such masters as 
Origen, Athanasius, and even Augustine, 
interpreted the Scriptures by methods as 
fantastic and absurd as could well enter 
into the most childish imagination. As 
tested by methods of modern inductive 
and scientific criticism, their allegorical 
philosophy was so largely a tissue of un- 
reality as to give us wonder how any sane, 
much less really great, minds could ever 
have espoused it. Yet this method of in- 
terpretation was so well-nigh universal and 
controlling as, down to a period just pre- 
ceding the Reformation, to rest like a 
thick and obscuring cloud over the entire 
Scriptures. Dr. George H. Gilbert, in his 
illuminating book, The Interpretation of 
the Bible, declares that in the mediaeval 



USE OF SCRIPTURE 59 

church the allegorical methods had far 
more influence than the entire teachings 
of Christ and his apostles. It was this 
obscuration that caused Luther to declare 
that the reading of the Bible by the gloss- 
ings of the Fathers is as "when one strains 
milk through a coal-sack/' 

Allegorism is the extreme opposite of 
literalism. Neither method can be made 
to apply on all-fours to Scripture interpre- 
tation. Many of the most pregnant pas- 
sages of both the Old and New Testaments 
cannot by any possibility be subjected to 
a geometrical literalism. On this principle 
Christ himself said many impossible things. 
How about a camel passing through the 
"eye of a needle"? It may be often ex- 
ceedingly difficult, and this is the emphasis 
of the saying, but it is not impossible that 
a rich man may enter the kingdom of 
heaven. Christ requires of no man that 
he shall literally "hate his father and his 
mother." But if it really comes to the 
crisis of choice as to whether a man shall 
cleave to Christ or to his parents, he must 
not hesitate for a moment as between the 
two. These and many other statements 



60 PREMILLENNIALISM 

falling from the lips of Christ, are simply 
expressions of a supreme emphasis upon 
the moral and spiritual requirements of 
his kingdom. These expressions are all 
Orientalisms which it would be obviously 
absurd to translate unmodified into terms 
of universal Christian practice* 

The premillennial school itself seems to 
have encountered such practical difficulty 
in this relation as to have developed, 
whether consciously or otherwise, a selec- 
tive method of Scripture interpretation. 
The expounders of this school seem very 
generally to emphasize, wherever found, 
such passages of Scripture as would seem 
to lend confirmation to their views, while 
at the same time they appear utterly 
oblivious to many strong passages which 
stand in clear opposition to their tenets. 
The Master's great and final commission, 
for instance, as recorded in Matt. 28. 18- 
20, seems for the most part to be singularly 
overlooked by the expositors of premillen- 
nialism. In this commission Christ dis- 
tinctly directs his disciples to go imme- 
diately into all the world for the purpose 
of evangelizing — not simply as a declara- 



USE OF SCRIPTURE 61 

tion or testimony of the gospel to the 
world — all nations, to baptize them in the 
name of the Holy Trinity, and to teach 
them as practical Christians to observe all 
things which he had commanded, and he 
adds the promise that he will be con- 
tinually with them even to the very end 
of the world. It is rationally impossible 
to read premillennialism into this com- 
mission. Yet this is one of the most 
significant, imperative, and all-inclusive 
commands to the church that ever fell 
from the lips of Christ. 

Another method common to premillen- 
nial writers, and seemingly essential to the 
plausibilities of their case, is to ransack 
the Scriptures for proof-texts in support 
of their doctrines. It appears to make 
little or no difference where a given text 
is found, or what its connections, if it 
contains any phraseology or suggestion 
which may be construed in support of 
their views. With a hunger for support 
that seems incapable of critical discrimina- 
tion they seize and segregate, as arrested 
innocent parties, passages in all the bibli- 
cal writings, from Genesis to Revelation, 



62 PREMILLENNIALISM 

which are eagerly construed in support of 
their doctrines. In various and swollen 
lists of such passages, as appearing here 
and there, the plain misappropriation, mis- 
construction, and false exegesis of great 
numbers of these passages are such as to 
stir in the mind of the sane and unpreju- 
diced biblical student a sense of revolt. 
One wonders at once how minds both 
honest and intelligent ever can come under 
the lure of such sophistical pleading. 

This method of miscellaneous use of 
texts in support of a given doctrine, or in 
the construction of a theological system, is 
now well-nigh universally discarded in ap- 
proved biblical scholarship. It is a kind 
of method by which, if it were valid, al- 
most any fad espoused by religious fanati- 
cism could be proven. It is a method to 
be repudiated as both unsound and un- 
safe for use in any valid theological con- 
struction. 

Premillennialism seems to be very little 
interested concerning either the history or 
lessons growing out of the first coming of 
Christ. The philosophy of this attitude is 
obvious. The real kingdom of Christ has 



USE OF SCRIPTURE 63 

not yet arrived. It will not even be in- 
stalled until Christ at some future coming 
shall set up his visible reign in the earth — 
a reign which shall be signalized by every 
token of majesty, of power, and authority. 
Then will follow the millennium, during 
which the nations shall be subject to 
Christ's irresistible rule. The period, how- 
ever prolonged, between Christ's first and 
second coming is, at best, little more than 
a dispensation of advertising, or witness- 
ing, to the peoples of the earth the fact of 
the coming kingdom. The chief purpose 
of such witnessing would seem to be to 
awaken in the minds of men a sense of 
responsibility, and therefore of accounta- 
bility, for repentance and obedience toward 
God. But as a spiritual scheme of race 
restoration, the present dispensation is a 
failure. A few here and there, exceptional 
cases, heeding the testimony of the gospel, 
will repent and believe, thus being in- 
cluded among those who at the Lord's 
coming will be caught up to meet him in 
the air; or, if they have previously died, 
to have part in the first resurrection. The 
world, however, as a whole will wax 



64 PREMILLENNIALISM 

worse and worse, more and more hopeless, 
to the very end of the present period. 

Premillennialism, postponing the real 
effectiveness of Christ's reign over the 
world until his majestic second coming, is 
under a logical necessity of emphasizing as 
little as possible the present spiritual order, 
I do not say that devout premillennialists 
attach no importance to the present gospel 
dispensation. But, at best, this dispensa- 
tion is but a twilight preparation as com- 
pared with the glory which shall burst 
upon the world in the millennial morning. 
The premillennial mind revels in the antici- 
pated glory of Christ's visible and resist- 
less reign in the earth. Under this 
obsession, as under an eclipse, all ade- 
quate perspective and vision of the real 
significance of the present spiritual order 
of the world seem hidden from sight. 

It is this miseducation which accounts 
for a most anachronistic construction in 
connection with Old Testament prophecy. 
That the highest prophetic utterance 
abounds in glowing Messianic predictions 
is in clearest evidence. Whatever else may 
be said concerning it, the elect Hebrew 



USE OF SCRIPTURE 65 

mind was prophetic in quality. It was a 
mind luminous and inspired with a sub- 
lime idealism. In its perspective the glory 
of the Davidic reign was itself but a type 
and prophecy of a far more enduring and 
exceedingly glorious era which somewhere 
awaited Israel's future. The Hebrew mind, 
however, including the noblest of the 
prophets, always clung to the coming 
Messianic glory as something to be dis- 
closed and to be realized upon the earth 
itself. The idea of a transcendent heavenly 
and spiritual kingdom as distinctly sep- 
arated ultimately from the earth was one 
which never came clearly into the older 
Jewish thought. It is a fact profoundly 
significant that Jesus Christ himself pre- 
sents alone the most ideal embodiment of 
the noblest Messianic prophecy. But it 
still remains seriously to ask how far, for 
instance, did Isaiah foresee in his own 
vision the real Jesus of Nazareth? Isaiah's 
idealism for the future was both highly 
ethical and spiritually glorious. In his 
description of the "Suffering Servant" he 
would seem almost to have drawn to the 
mirror the features of Christ's humilia- 



66 PREMILLENNIALISM 

tion. But, if we place Isaiah's Messianic 
visions upon the one hand, and the his- 
toric Christ of the New Testament upon 
the other, it will require something far 
other than a literalistic interpretation of 
Scripture to make the one fit into the 
other. Isaiah was moved by the loftiest 
inspirations of prophetic idealism; but it 
is more than doubtful whether the photo- 
graphic character of the Jesus of the New 
Testament ever rested clearly in his vision. 
In any event, it is perfectly clear that when 
Jesus of Nazareth was fulfilling his match- 
less ministry under their very eyes, the 
Jerusalem Jews did not place upon him 
the robes of Isaiah's vision. 

But aside entirely from the question as 
to whether the prophetic vision embraced 
clearly and distinctly the historic Christ, 
there is not the slightest evidence that the 
Messianic predictions were intended to 
apply to the second rather than to the 
first coming of our Lord. It may be ques- 
tioned whether in all the history of critical 
construction there is a more radical break 
with consistent interpretation than comes 
to the front in the premillennial theory of 



USE OF SCRIPTURE 67 

Old Testament prophecy. For this theory, 
the reign of Christ upon the earth is so 
transcendent, of such supreme conse- 
quence, as to have given birth to the 
preposterous invention of transferring the 
significance of the great body of Old Tes- 
tament Messianic prophecy to a period 
following the second advent of Christ. 
This kind of construction, of course, is 
fatally beset by irreducible and insuper- 
able historic obstacles. The principles on 
which such a theory could be justified 
might be used in support of almost any 
kind of conspiracy against the sanity of 
the race. To say nothing about its trans- 
parent inconsistencies, it possesses at least 
the merits of an amazing audacity. 

Now, concerning all these methods of 
premillennial treatment of Old Testament 
prophecy, it ought to be enough to call 
attention to the fact that they belong to a 
vogue thoroughly superseded in the most 
approved methods of biblical study. The 
Bible contains sixty-six distinct publica- 
tions. The varying dates of these publi- 
cations range approximately over a period 
of a thousand years. Each book has its 



68 PREMILLENNIALISM 

own distinct cause for existence. Each has 
its historic background and environment. 
The books vary greatly in literary and 
moral values, now reflecting the limited 
knowledge and varying ethical judgments 
of primitive peoples, and again rising to 
the most luminous levels of highest in- 
spiration. The books in their due order, 
and in their entire sweep, reveal a pro- 
gressive and ever-enlarging disclosure of 
God's methods and purposes for the world, 
more especially through the channel of 
Hebrew history. Whatever else may be 
said about them, however divine their mis- 
sion, these books have come into our pos- 
session as a body of literature. As such 
they have a history. It is legitimate for 
scholarship, by all means at its disposal, 
reverently to possess itself of all the facts 
of this history. Divested of the deadly 
pall of unreasoning prejudice, no proposi- 
tion can be more sane than this. It is 
self-evident that the books themselves can- 
not be best understood and appreciated 
without the most perfect knowledge of 
their histories. The truly scientific way of 
studying the Bible is to investigate entire 



USE OF SCRIPTURE 69 

books at a time, and to study them so far 
as possible in the light of the environment 
in which and of the purposes for which 
they respectively were written. It is not 
always true that the same terms as used 
in different books mean the same things. 
We always must be careful not to read 
into any of the statements a modern mean- 
ing which could not possibly have existed 
in the minds of the original writers. We 
must in every case, so far as possible — 
and generally it is quite possible — seek to 
know just what the writer means by the 
words he uses. We can have a correct 
and most profitable understanding of the 
Bible only in just the measure in which it 
speaks to us its own original meaning. 
But in proportion as this result is realized 
nothing will be clearer than that the 
method of ransacking the entire Bible for 
proof -texts by which to establish theologi- 
cal preconceptions, is both an illogical and 
false method. Yet it is a method which 
immemorially has been fruitful in intro- 
ducing most unfortunate perversions and 
abuses into Bible uses. 

The unity of the Bible is not so much 



70 PREMILLENNIALISM 

literary as moral. The books do not all 
teach the same thing. The real unity and 
combined power of these books are to be 
found in the perfect mosaic which, with 
all their varying qualities, they furnish in 
their superlative record of God's one and 
progressive revelation of himself to the 
human world. So far as the Bible is con- 
cerned, the grave charge to be made 
against premillennialism is that its treat- 
ment of the Scriptures is arbitrary and not 
scientific. Its doctrines can be made even 
plausible only by methods of special plead- 
ing and special constructions. For its 
special purposes it has turned the Bible 
into a miscellaneous textbook. By this 
method, if accepted without thought, 
without protest, almost any theory, how- 
ever absurd, could find plausible support. 



CHAPTER V 

PREMILLENNIALISM JEWISH: 
NOT CHRISTIAN 

The Old Testament as a historic record 
of God's processes of preparation for the 
coming spiritual kingdom of his Son can 
be neither minified nor displaced. It will 
be forever exalted and glorified as an es- 
sential record of God's revelation of him- 
self to mankind. No other ancient reli- 
gious literature, the New Testament, of 
course, excepted, however great its sig- 
nificance, is worthy to be classed with the 
Old Testament. Measured by its dis- 
tinctive purpose, no human praise or ap- 
preciation can overmatch the merits of 
its record. But we may justly remember 
that in estimating the Old Testament we 
are moving always in a realm of types, 
shadows, codes, sacrifices, ritual, song, 
prophecy, much of which was crudely rudi- 
mental, most of which was temporary, all 
of which was preparatory to a fuller 
71 



72 PREMILLENNIALISM 

revelation. The Old Testament was a 
pioneer and a guide through long and 
shadowed ages, across wide and unsur- 
veyed territories of desert and wilderness, 
to the gateways of an immeasurably higher 
and abiding dispensation for the world 
which was to be disclosed with the advent 
of Christ. What the foundation is to the 
superstructure, Judaism was to Christian- 
ity. This material figure, however, does 
not and cannot express the vital rela- 
tionships of the Judaic and Christian dis- 
pensations to each other. In the sense 
that the one was purely provisional and 
preparatory, the other enduring and final; 
that the one was the historic matrix, the 
other the final and adequate disclosure of 
God's spiritual and redemptive purposes 
for the race — in this sense Christianity 
may be declared to have been born of 
Judaism. Without, however, the revela- 
tion of which the New Testament gives us 
the record, had Christ never come, had 
the Holy Spirit as Christ's interpreter and 
revealer to the world not been specially 
given to attest and confirm Christ's re- 
demptive advent, then, in such case, the 



NOT CHRISTIAN 73 

Old Testament would have fallen into his- 
toric thought as a system both abortive 
and helpless. The entire significance of 
the Old Testament for abiding spiritual 
and moral values, or as a religion for 
humanity, has its emphasis and interpre- 
tation supremely in the revelation of Jesus 
Christ. Judaism represents the prepara- 
tory and the superseded; Christianity the 
final and ever-developing revelation of 
God's spiritual administration for the 
human world. 

It is a distinctive and abiding glory of 
the Hebrew revelation that the great 
prophets luminously and authoritatively 
emphasized ethical and spiritual character 
as a supreme condition of enjoying Jeho- 
vah's favor. The vision of a righteous 
monotheism grew in clearness with the 
development of the prophetic school. The 
majesty, glory, and power of the righteous 
and sovereign God, the universality of his 
sway in the affairs of men, as set forth by 
Isaiah and Jeremiah, will forever hold a 
foremost place among the sublime chap- 
ters of religious literature. The historic 
tragedy is that Judaism in its controlling 



74 PREMILLENNIALISM 

thought and policies, notwithstanding the 
high inspirations of its great prophets, 
never caught the vision of the solely moral 
and spiritual significance of the Messianic 
reign. Their horizon of the kingdom was 
earthly. The high ideals of the prophetic 
era went under eclipse. From the days of 
Ezekiel, and ever after, ritual, priest, and 
altar held the dominant place in Jewish 
thought and worship. The Judaic concep- 
tion of the Messianic kingdom grew thor- 
oughly materialistic. The Messiah was to 
be an earthly sovereign. The Hebrew 
people were to be his favored subjects, 
and through him they were to be the 
rulers of the nations. The kingdom was to 
be one of unprecedented glory and author- 
ity, highly moral perhaps, but yet earthly 
in its appointments and manifestations. 
In the meantime and always the highest 
obligation of the devout Jew was to fulfill 
the rites which his ritual enjoined. 

This thorough preoccupation with, this 
intense and all-persuasive obsession of, a 
Messianic materialistic kingdom in the 
earth, fully possessed the Jewish mind 
when Christ made his advent in Bethle- 



NOT CHRISTIAN 75 

hem. Christ, himself, in all the schooling 
of his disciples, constantly encountered 
this obsession. It is to be admitted, I 
think, that Christ, through all his min- 
istry, was much of an enigma to his dis- 
ciples. By his ineffable charm, by the 
marvels of his power, he commanded their 
wondering admiration and loyalty. But in 
his lifetime they never knew quite what 
to make of him. It is certain that to the 
very last they looked upon him as the 
one who should secure a temporal do- 
minion for Israel. Down to the very scene 
of the cross these disciples had a most 
imperfect apprehension of the spiritual 
significance of their Master's mission. To 
the very close they were scheming among 
themselves for places and honors of politi- 
cal preferment in the kingdom which they 
believed he was about to establish. The 
ambitious mother of James and John per- 
sonally besought Christ to give to her two 
sons the places of chief honor, the one to 
be placed upon his left, the other upon his 
right hand, when he should come into his 
kingdom. The other disciples, hearing of 
this, were greatly offended against the two, 



76 PREMILLENNIALXSM 

not because they themselves had any bet- 
ter ideals, but because they were equally po- 
litically ambitious, and felt that James and 
John, by coming earlier upon the scene, had 
thus sought to forestall their own chances. 
For these same disciples not even Pente- 
cost, with all its spiritual illumination, was 
sufficient to correct and to eradicate this 
obsession. For a long time, at least, the 
original disciples maintained for them- 
selves headquarters at Jerusalem. Cere- 
monially, they were more Jewish than 
Christian. Peter was partially emanci- 
pated by a miraculous vision, but even so 
his deep-rooted Jewish training so far con- 
trolled his thought and action that Paul 
found it necessary to rebuke and to with- 
stand him face to face. Saint Paul, the 
latest installed of the apostles, was the 
first of them all to apprehend that the 
distinctive types and usages of Judaism 
were to be displaced and superseded by 
the genius of Christianity. All through 
his great missionary career he was per- 
petually hounded by teachers who in- 
sidiously sought by a reversion to Judaizing 
ceremonial and method to rob his converts 



NOT CHRISTIAN 77 

of their Christian freedom. Such was the 
persistence of the Jewish obsession. Saint 
Paul never will be overestimated. To him 
almost alone was due the rescuing of 
Christianity itself from becoming a mere 
Judaizing sect. If such had been its elec- 
tion, it would long since, so far as we can 
now see, have perished from the earth. 
Saint Paul was the first of the great Chris- 
tian teachers to give universal application 
to all races of the gospel of redemption 
through Jesus Christ. 

Nothing could be plainer than Saint 
Paul's reiterated teaching of the utter 
superseding by Christianity of Jewish law 
and ceremonial. To him Christianity was 
the spiritual fulfillment of what at best in 
Jewish ritual was but material type and 
foreshadowing. In the interest of Chris- 
tian freedom from the bondage of Jewish 
usage he not only withstood Peter but as 
well the entire apostolic company at Jeru- 
salem, forcing upon them the correctness 
of his view and securing their formal in- 
dorsement of the same. The masterful 
Epistle to the Romans turns largely upon 
the fact that the sinner is not and cannot 



78 PREMILLENNIALISM 

be saved by the law, but by faith in 
Jesus Christ. "For what the law could 
not do, in that it was weak through the 
flesh, God sending his only Son in the 
likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, con- 
demned sin in the flesh: that the right- 
eousness of the law might be fulfilled in 
us, who walk not after the flesh, but 
after the Spirit." To the Corinthians 
Paul represents himself as the "minister 
of a new testament," or covenant, which 
ministers not after the Jewish law, the 
letter which killeth, but which worketh 
for the spirit of the believer in Jesus 
Christ life and liberty. In the Galatian 
church, founded by Paul, insidious Juda- 
izing teachers had impressed the converts 
with the necessity of conformity to Jewish 
usages. Paul's letter to this church is not 
only a philippic of denunciation against 
these false teachers, but it utters a distinct 
disavowal and renunciation of Jewish cere- 
monialism as having no place in the 
Christian life. He says: "O foolish Gala- 
tians, who hath bewitched you, that ye 
should not obey the truth, before whose 
eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set 



NOT CHRISTIAN 79 

forth, crucified among you?" He brands 
the Jewish views and usages to which these 
converts had turned back as "weak and 
beggarly elements/' the embracing of which 
would subject the man once made free in 
Jesus Christ to renewed spiritual bondage. 
He says: "If ye are led of the Spirit, ye 
are not under the law." The Epistle to 
the Hebrews is distinctively devoted to the 
purpose of showing that in Christ Jewish 
ordinances are not only fulfilled, but super- 
seded. Indeed, the New Testament itself 
is largely a psychological history of the 
conflict between Jewish traditionalism and 
the principle of spiritual freedom in Christ. 
It is the picture of a great arena in which 
is enacted one of the most decisive con- 
flicts in the spiritual history of mankind. 

It would seem an anomaly, a very 
anachronism of thought that any mind 
in this twentieth century, professing to 
live near the heart of the New Testament, 
should retrovert to the adoption for pro- 
fessed Christian purposes of Old Testa- 
ment ceremonial and usages. But this is 
the mental attitude which premillennial- 
ism openly assumes for itself. I do not 



80 PREMILLENNIALISM 

assert that in this respect all premillen- 
nialists hold identical views. I deem it 
fair, however, to judge of the system by 
the declarations of its chief exponents. 
It is certain that a pronounced majority 
of premillennial writers lay great emphasis 
upon the restoration of Old Testament 
usages which, in their view, are to be 
reinstalled in the millennial kingdom. 

Since the writing, for the most part, of 
this manuscript, the very illuminating vol- 
ume The Coming of the Lord, by Dr. 
James H. Snowden, has come to my hand. 
I herewith quote from him a paragraph 
most pertinent to the phase now before us. 
He says: "Who would ever have expected 
that in the face of all this teaching and of 
these earnest efforts to rid the Christian 
Church of these old ordinances that had 
served their day as the withered and 
empty husk has served the corn, there 
would arise among believers in later times 
a school of interpreters who would teach 
that the whole Mosaic system, with its 
temple and central seat of worship and its 
seasons and feasts and sacrifices, its pass- 
over and unleavened bread, its daily peace 



NOT CHRISTIAN 81 

offerings and bloody burnt-offerings and 
sin-offerings, its altar streaming with blood 
and its smoke of incense, was to be re- 
stored in Jerusalem after the second com- 
ing of Christ? Who could have believed 
this incredible thing? And yet this very 
thing has come to pass and now is." 

It is, as already noted, a principle of 
premillennialism to apply the Old Testa- 
ment Messianic prophecies to the period 
following the second, rather than the first, 
coming of Christ, thus giving them their 
chief significance in connection with the 
millennial kingdom which, it is assumed, 
Christ will then establish. This, charac- 
terized by Dr. Snowden as an "enormous 
unscriptural dislocation/ 5 seems necessary 
to a system which teaches that the world 
will not and cannot be converted until 
Christ comes in person to establish his 
visible and irresistible reign in the earth. 
This whole assumption is, of course, a 
huge and audacious begging for position. 
It is in gross violation of all standard and 
sane methods of interpretation. Granted 
the legitimacy of this type of construction, 
and any vagary ever submitted to human 



82 PREMILLENNIALISM 

thought must be accorded standing-room 
in the arena of discussion. To a mind 
committed to this basic process, it is just 
as easy to believe that Jonah swallowed the 
whale, as that the whale swallowed Jonah. 
The capital of the millennial kingdom is 
to be literally located at Jerusalem. The 
temple, pictured by Ezekiel, rising in un- 
precedented grandeur, is to be located on 
Mount Zion. Here all the devout of the 
nations are to assemble for worship. The 
glowing pictures as given by the ancient 
prophets of vast assemblies gathered at 
the temple shrines are strictly literalized 
in connection with millennial predictions. 
It is not easy to imagine just how this 
physical diagram is to be carried out. Its 
acceptance would seem to call for a daring 
credulity. But there is a faith not easily 
shared by some minds, "a faith that 
laughs at impossibilities, and cries, Tt 
must be done. 5 " One recent lecturer 
says: "The modern aeroplane will solve the 
problem of migration. The aeroplane will 
be greatly perfected, its speed immeasura- 
bly accelerated, its flight made secure by 
divine protection, so that journeys to Jeru- 



NOT CHRISTIAN 83 

salem from the ends of the earth can be 
compassed in the course of a few hours/ 5 
Of course, with conditions like these to be 
commanded, it is idle to discuss any other 
seeming obstacles to the enterprise! 

It would be easy to prove from the pens 
of many witnesses that the creed of mod- 
ern premillennialism is a strange harking 
back from the thought-life of this twen- 
tieth century to far-away Old Testament 
days and usages — days and usages now 
both dead and silent. While discounting 
the phenomenal spiritual achievements of 
the Christianity of to-day, the system 
calls for a restoration of outgrown rites 
and ceremonies — for the "blood of bulls 
and of goats," the smoking altar and the 
mitered priest. This type of reversion will 
doubtless survive many of its own proph- 
ecies and mistakes. It will doubtless long 
continue to have attractions for certain 
types of mind. In the meantime knowl- 
edge will increase and wisdom grow, and 
some day premillennialism will be cast 
aside, classified as an outgrowth both 
anomalous and alien in the historic de- 
velopment of a rational Christianity. 



CHAPTER VI 

ANTAGONISTIC OF SCIENTIFIC 
PROPHECY 

Measured a priori, the falseness of 
premillennialism is emphasized by its 
antagonism to dominant scientific and 
philosophical views of the world. The 
earliest message of the Old Testament 
clearly indicates that the supreme purpose 
of the material and lesser animate crea- 
tion was subordinate to and preparatory 
for the advent of man. This was a sub- 
lime generalization reached by the Hebrew 
historian. If the Western mind could di- 
vest itself of its stubborn tendency to 
literalize the fine imaginative and poetic 
qualities of Oriental thought, there would 
be seen in this early narrative of Genesis, 
and without impairment of the moral sig- 
nificance of the message, a fine evidence 
of a supervising divine inspiration. 

Modern science comes to the witness- 
stand with overwhelming testimony and 
force to amplify and to confirm the mar- 



SCIENTIFIC PROPHECY 85 

velous generalization of the Hebrew poet- 
historian, namely, that man is the crowning 
end of all creative processes. The Hebrew 
seer lived in what at best was a limited 
physical universe. He was familiar only 
with a narrow geography. His map of 
nations was small. The earth on which he 
lived, however diversified by mountain and 
plain, was, in the main, a flat surface stretch- 
ing away to its seashore. The heavens 
above him were a not far removed canopy, 
hung with the lamps of sun, moon, stars, 
and planets for the allurement of his fancy 
and the guidance of his feet. The physical 
universe, as he saw it, suggested to him 
no thought of the indefinite aeons through 
which it had been shaped for his habitation 
and uses. Its structure might have been 
created by a divine fiat in the course of a 
few diurnal days, and, for all that he 
thought, it might at some time be folded 
together as a vesture, and pass away in a 
night. 

The contrast between the cosmic meas- 
urements of Hebrew thought and the 
known facts of to-day is something im- 
measurable and indescribable. We now 



86 PREMILLENNIALISM 

see the creative periods, so far from being 
confined to six days of twenty-four hours 
each, stretching back to beginnings re- 
moved to an infinite and dateless past. 
The boundaries of the physical universe, 
as now conceived, are limitless. After the 
expression of Richter's angel, they "are 
without beginning, and, lo, they are with- 
out end!" 

Yet, notwithstanding the stupendous ex- 
pansion, both as to duration and space, of 
our knowledge of the physical universe, 
we have thus far reached no height of 
observation which does not reaffirm the 
conclusion of the old Hebrew seer that 
man is the chief goal of all cosmic proc- 
esses. We are now migrating through 
infinite fields. Concededly, of course, we 
are now traversing a realm of speculative 
thought. We must plant our premises 
upon inference rather than upon known 
facts. But, if man is the final end of the 
material creation, then there is certainly 
much ground to infer that his kind is to 
have a long continuance upon the earth. 
Accepting the fact of an intelligent and 
moral Creator of the universe, a Creator 



SCIENTIFIC PROPHECY 87 

who from the beginning has wrought to- 
ward, and who has made all material 
developments subordinate to, moral, spirit- 
ual, and eternal ends, then the rational 
logic of the situation fortifies a revolt 
against any belief which asserts that the 
stay of the human race upon the earth is 
at longest but for a brief period, a period 
to be terminated in the near future by a 
stroke of catastrophe. Judging from all 
human analogy, the time of preparation of 
the house for its inhabitant is brief as 
compared with the living tenancy of the 
house itself. With man always in the 
foreground of creative thought, the proc- 
esses of preparing the world for his habi- 
tation date far back into infinite time. 
The mind is staggered by the cosmic 
process, working all the way from the 
original mists, and through innumerable 
changes, to the final completion of the 
earth as a fitting abode for man. Rational 
mind refuses to believe that all this in- 
finite preparation is to exhaust its meaning 
in a few brief centuries. Certainly, all 
sane science is both impatient and intol- 
erant of such a conclusion. 



88 PREMILLENNIALISM 

The earth itself is a great storehouse 
crowded with materials both needed and 
to be utilized by a human civilization. 
The inexhaustible wealth of nature, which 
seems to have no significance except for 
the uses of man, has hardly yet been 
touched. It is even doubtful whether very 
many of its most potential values have as 
yet been discovered. The material re- 
sources of the earth, both as developed 
and as yet undiscovered, for the uses of 
human invention and art, are simply in- 
calculable. The world's fertile lands, un- 
der intensive culture, are capable of 
producing bread and fruit to satisfy the 
physical hunger of the human race for 
indefinite ages to come. 

Thus far we have been dwelling upon 
the grosser plane of man's material and 
inventional needs. But, these needs being 
met, there is a cultural side of human life 
upon the earth which rises into transcen- 
dent significance and value. The earth is 
not only a great material storehouse, but 
it is a vast laboratory, an exhaustless art 
gallery; within its bosom it enfolds infinite 
records of God's thought — of his processes 



SCIENTIFIC PROPHECY 89 

and his purposes toward the human world. 
All this gives unlimited scope for man's 
scientific education, for the culture of his 
esthetical nature, for an ever-growing ac- 
quisition of historic, philosophical, and 
moral knowledge. God has adapted the 
world as a great training-school for the 
human race. All the crude material needed 
as scaffolding for the finer and enduring 
structures of culture are abundant and 
cheap. But all the realizations of historic, 
scientific, and philosophical knowledge, all 
the developments of art and appliances 
needed for a growing and perfecting civili- 
zation — all this, as growing out of man's 
study and appropriation of nature's treas- 
ures, is as yet but alphabetical. Every new 
scientific discovery reveals doors opening 
upon new treasures, every new philosophic 
achievement lifts thought to new summits 
of observation, every advance in invention 
and knowledge adds a new credential to 
man's lordship in the material universe. 
The human race in its time-journey thus 
far in the earth has manifestly reached only 
the dawn of its intellectual and moral pos- 
sibilities. 



90 PREMILLENNIALISM 

The ancient seers prophesied, and in- 
spired poets sang, of a golden age some- 
where embodied in the future of human 
history. We are accustomed to regard 
these voices as witnessing to God's own 
purposes for man. But if we have the 
open vision and the listening ear, there will 
be disclosed to us in these very days an- 
other prophetic revelation, also voicing 
God's thought and amply confirming the 
vision of the ancient seer. This is the 
prophecy of growing modern scientific 
knowledge. This revelation contains a 
confident prediction of the time when, 
under man's trained and culturing hand, 
the very earth itself, so far as its material 
features are concerned, shall be transformed 
into a human paradise. More than this, 
the social and moral atmospheres of the 
world are electric with the prophecy for 
this world of a coming race that shall be 
brotherly, just, wise, high-minded, pure — 
a race over which Christ shall be Sovereign, 
and the charter of whose society shall be 
the Golden Rule. 

The diagram of this coming world- 
society will require time for its fulfillment. 



SCIENTIFIC PROPHECY 91 

But the voices of scientific thought cer- 
tainly cannot be those of lying prophets. 
To assert as against nature's own testimony 
of divine and infinite possibilities the doc- 
trine that the human order is soon to come 
to a catastrophic end, is to assert a doc- 
trine against which all scientific probabili- 
ties enter a combined protest. It makes 
the cosmic plan of the universe, so far as 
man is concerned, a mere abortive develop- 
ment. We are unable to believe that na- 
ture's boundless wealth of both provision 
and appliance, apparently in anticipation 
of man's needs and requirements, is finally 
to have no more significance than that of a 
measureless and meaningless waste. While 
we may not after our human pattern class 
God as an economist, yet it is impossible 
for us reverently to think of him as an 
infinite prodigal. To think of him as 
storing the universe with unmeasured re- 
sources adapted to the needs of man, and 
of man only, and then, in man's very in- 
fancy, and when the resources lie in na- 
ture's bosom well-nigh untouched, of sud- 
denly snatching the human race away from 
the earth, and of setting fire to the store- 



92 PREMILLENNIALISM 

house — all this must impress us as an 
irrational process. 

Man is myriad-sided. He is a creature 
endowed with many faculties. We must 
believe that every faculty which God has 
given him has its own significance. It is 
in the order divinely ordained that each 
human faculty should have scope for its 
full function and development. Among the 
highest gifts with which God has endowed 
man is the faculty for rational thought — 
for logic, for philosophy, for scientific in- 
vestigation, and for all those great gen- 
eralizations which underlie the world's 
practical thinking. Man's intellectual na- 
ture carries in itself the prophecy of in- 
finite possibilities of development. No goal 
is in sight beyond which the race may not 
make unmeasured increase in knowledge 
and in wisdom. In any ordered world it is 
inconceivable that man's intellect should 
not have scope for its finest action, for its 
fullest development. The cosmic universe 
itself is adapted and endowed as an un- 
limited training-school for man's rational 
powers. All scientific achievement stands 
as proof of this statement. Nature has fur- 



SCIENTIFIC PROPHECY 93 

nished the training school and the labora- 
tories out of which has been wrought all 
scientific knowledge. Still, physical science 
is but in its infancy. Nature, on every side, 
challenges it for infinite advancements. To 
exhaust the scientific resources of the earth 
would seem to call for industrious and in- 
definite ages yet to come. The speedy 
ending of the world calls for a preposterous 
negation of all scientific prophecy. 

The same is true in the broader concep- 
tion of civilization. God designed this world 
as a training school for the race in the 
broader realms of society and of citizenship. 
Out of man's social nature itself are to be 
developed and perfected all the relations 
which are to enter into ideal social, govern- 
mental, international civilization for the 
whole world. The social nature in man is 
fundamental to God's purposes for His 
kingdom in the earth. History itself is a 
revelation of the slow but sure social and 
civic advances of the race from most primi- 
tive beginnings. But, as in the case of the 
racial intellectual development, the com- 
bined testimony of science and of prophecy 
points to unlimited human advancements 



94 PREMILLENNIALISM 

before the ideal civilization is to be realized 
in the earth. The earth, by all of its en- 
dowments and possibilities, is supremely 
adapted as God's training field for the com- 
ing "Golden Age" of humanity. Suddenly 
to destroy the world, when as yet God's 
diagram for humanity seems only in its 
initial fulfillment — such a proposition, in 
all rational measurement, can but seem 
as both enigmatical and perverse. All 
this, in the vision of rational science, is 
preposterous. The scientific mind firmly 
refuses to believe that nature is a false 
prophet. It cannot look upon the cosmic 
order, infinite both in wealth and promise, 
as simply a huge deception. It cannot 
think of human existence upon the earth, 
as in the acceptance of the premillennial 
philosophy it would be compelled to, as 
something no better than a meaningless 
medley. The scientific mind will stand in 
perpetual revolt against such teaching. A 
sane philosophy of thought will condemn it 
as irrational. The hard practical sense of 
the business world will repudiate it. The 
very stars in their silent march will fight 
against and finally destroy its absurdities. 



CHAPTER VII 

A FALSE PSYCHOLOGY OF 
HISTORY 

Premillennialism does not yield a true 
psychology of history. Its outlook upon 
the historic program of the world is pes- 
simistic and distorted. It fails to be in- 
spired by the splendid moral and spiritual 
progress, now in full evidence, of Christ's 
kingdom in the earth. So far as it has 
influence at all, in this age of growing 
spiritual life and light, it is a blind leader 
of the blind. 

A fact which we must ever keep before 
us is that the Bible, as a whole, is a book 
not to be judged or measured on a plane of 
materialistic literalism. Its interpretations 
must be lifted to moral and spiritual levels. 
From beginning to end its moral unity must 
be discovered and demonstrated by its 
spiritually prophetic outlook. It is per- 
fectly clear, and may be reverently said, 
that unless the meaning of its great proph- 
95 



96 PREMILLENNIALISM 

ecies is to be finally found in a spiritual 
significance, then many of these prophecies 
themselves are quite misleading. History 
is the great interpreter. The significance 
of this fact is tremendously emphasized 
when its tests are applied to the most 
prominent heights of Old Testament state- 
ment. 

For instance, Israel went down into 
Egypt to avoid famine, and to live peace- 
fully in a land of plenty. But Egypt finally 
meant for Israel an intolerable enslave- 
ment. Moses was God's appointed deliv- 
erer for this race. But the generation that 
went out of Egypt with Moses perished in 
the desert. Joshua was to lead their suc- 
cessors into the "Promised Land." But 
when they arrived at the gates they met 
there with all sorts and manners of oppo- 
sition. They could possess the promised 
inheritance only at the price of war. For 
whole generations the career of Israel in 
Canaan was one of continuous turmoil, one 
prolonged conflict with idolatrous and alien 
tribes. When the Judaic theocracy would 
seem well-nigh attained; when the glorious 
temple, the most beautiful house of wor- 



A FALSE PSYCHOLOGY 97 

ship in the world, its arches resonant with 
a gorgeous ritual, stood on Mount Zion, 
when the pious Jews were most sure that 
Jehovah, the Lord of Hosts, was pledged as 
against all foes, to the perpetuity and glory 
of the Hebrew nation — even then hostile 
armies were mustering for the destruction 
of Jerusalem and for the utter laying in 
waste of its temple. The very "chosen 
people' ' of God were to be driven like 
slaves to a dismal, hopeless, and distant 
captivity in Babylon. 

It would seem that in all literature noth- 
ing could exceed the glowing description 
given by the great prophets as to the 
grandeur and triumphs which should at- 
tend these captives when they should re- 
turn again to Jerusalem, once more to 
establish their walls and to rebuild their 
temple. But the real history of such cap- 
tives as returned presents only a drama of 
poverty, of disappointment, of discourage- 
ment. 

The Jewish people were intensely am- 
bitious for a national autonomy. As the 
elect and chosen people of Jehovah, they 
forever indulged themselves in the hope 



98 PREMILLENNIALISM 

that under the direct reign of the Almighty 
God they were to realize a kingdom of sur- 
passing glory and power in the earth. 
There can be no doubt, I must think, that 
the thought of many of the great prophetic 
utterances was inspired by this vision. 
But, alas for human forecast! This na- 
tional hope too proved illusive. The Jewish 
people nevermore, after the captivity, en- 
joyed anything like a national autonomy, 
except for a brief period of eighty years, 
beginning with B. C. 142. In a material 
sense the Israelitish people were never per- 
mitted to realize the fruitful heritage and 
the triumphal career so vividly foretold by 
their prophetic teachers. Applying the 
same historic test to early Christian escha- 
tological thought, which we have seen was 
largely an inheritance from Judaism, that 
Christ would soon return to rule the world 
in a visible and materialistic glory, we also 
discover, as in full keeping with the proph- 
ecies of Old Testament history, that this 
view was one, certainly in the form in 
which it was held, which was never veri- 
fied. 

The obvious truth is that, if we are to 



A FALSE PSYCHOLOGY 99 

be governed by a sound interpretation of 
the Bible and of history itself, we must 
translate God's thought and purposes for 
his kingdom among men in terms of the 
moral and spiritual rather than under any 
earthly or physical symbolism. Even 
Christ himself found frequent occasion to 
chide his own disciples for their inherited 
and persistent tendency to interpret all 
his mission in terms of a worldly realm. 

A grave charge, the gravest kind of a 
charge, to be made against premillennial- 
ism is that its philosophy is fatally out of 
harmony with God's historic and manifest 
method for the moral redemption of the 
world. Nearly two thousand years have 
passed since Christ arose from Bethany. 
The plain logic of premillennialism is that 
in all these centuries God has been dealing 
with the world by inefficient processes. 
The world itself is looked upon as hope- 
lessly bad. Its open sore is incurable by 
such methods as God has employed through 
all these so-called Christian centuries. The 
most that can be expected is that an ex- 
ceptional soul, here and there, may be res- 
cued from the sinking wreck. Substan- 



100 PREMILLENNIALISM 

tially from the beginning of history, human 
society has been gliding morally downward. 
The present age is one of the worst and 
most hopeless in all history. From the 
bosom of society, however intellectual, 
however scientific, however inventive, can 
spring forth no remedial agencies which can 
efficiently work the world's betterment. 
As one has said, "The present order of 
society is something to be damned, not to 
be redeemed." 

I do not say that the devotees of this 
philosophy rejoice in their vision of the 
world's growing wickedness and hopeless- 
ness. But this outlook is fundamental and 
essential to their beliefs. The world's fear- 
ful and hopeless collapse into wickedness 
alone furnishes the justifying premise on 
which they build their expectation of a 
sudden and catastrophic ending of the 
present age — an ending to be effected by 
the phenomenal appearing of Christ in the 
clouds for the purpose of working the phy- 
sical destruction of his foes from the earth. 

The pessimism of premillennialism for 
our human world is like a cancerous virus 
vitiating its entire blood. The real logic of 



A FALSE PSYCHOLOGY 101 

its philosophy is to unfit men for healthy- 
views of human life, to unnerve and to 
make them listless toward life's practical 
duties. Saint Paul early discovered this 
tendency in the church at Thessalonica. 
People obsessed by the idea of the Lord's 
speedy coming became neglectful and im- 
provident toward the ordinary duties and 
necessities of their normal, everyday life in 
the world. 

Measured with equal justice and sym- 
pathy, there is seen nothing so marvelous 
in history as the testimony which it fur- 
nishes concerning the person of Jesus 
Christ, and the power of his growing king- 
dom in the earth — a kingdom which pre- 
millennialism teaches as something not yet 
inaugurated. Placing ourselves among his- 
toric origins, we need to have large and 
clear apprehension of the religious con- 
ditions of the world in order to any just 
understanding of the marvelous moral 
transformations which have been wrought 
through the name and power of the historic 
Christ. Rome is so commonly and so 
superficially referred to in colloquial ex- 
pression as to seem to the average mind 



102 PREMILLENNIALISM 

no more significant than a threadbare term. 
But the real Rome will stand forever like 
a very Mont Blanc in human history. 
Humanly measured, it was the greatest 
governmental construction that ever yet 
has come to civilization. Its dominion ex- 
tended from the rivers of the Orient to 
the shores of the Atlantic. Its govern- 
mental genius was consummate. While its 
authority was imperial and supreme, its 
rule was so adaptive and so considerate of 
the opinions and customs of its widely 
varying subjects as to capture and blend 
in enthusiastic loyalty the most diverse 
populations. The magic of its very name 
was such as to inspire the remotest provin- 
cial with a desire to be affiliated with its 
life. Religion received high consideration 
in the policies of the empire. These policies 
were, as a matter of course, polytheistic in 
scope. In the Pantheon there was a place 
for every god, and there might have been a 
tablet for every faith. But it is not easy 
to realize the full significance of all this 
even when we search laboriously the rec- 
ords of all the ancient religions which were 
domesticated and, in a sense, coordinated 



A FALSE PSYCHOLOGY 103 

in the Roman Pantheon. There were India 
and Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, Persia, and 
Greece, together with the barbarians of 
northern and western Europe. Nothing 
seemingly could be more diverse and ir- 
reconcilable in types of nationality and 
religion. But the genius of Rome domes- 
ticated and blended all these faiths, with 
the possible exception of the Jews, into its 
own governmental household. It was as 
though there were but one religion for the 
world. 

All this is surpassingly wonderful, but 
the wonder grows into amazement as we 
estimate the power, the exclusiveness, and 
persistency of the great ancient faiths. 
Rome, in her historic achievements, and 
not least in her coordination of world-reli- 
gions, cannot well be hyperbolized. She will 
forever stand in the gaze of history — 
unique, majestic, wonderful. To all con- 
temporaneous thought she might well seem 
a structure built for eternity. 

At the very height of all this power, of 
its culture, of its wealth, of its prosperity, 
of its luxury, a Peasant was humbly born 
in a remote and despised province of the 



104 PREMILLENNIALISM 

empire. That a babe so born would be 
potential in changing the character of 
Rome, and of giving a new direction to the 
destinies of the world, would seem in an- 
ticipation the most remote of probabilities. 
But the Peasant of Nazareth, himself never 
holding the scepter of secular government, 
never supported by militant organizations, 
never wearing the ermine of judicial au- 
thority, and never a university student or 
literary author — to him was reserved the 
mission literally to transform the face of 
the world and to give to civilization a new 
moral direction. 

Antecedently, the obstacles to such a 
mission would seem both immeasurable 
and insuperable, and all the more so when 
we consider the character of his reforms. 
The gods of polytheism were universally 
impure. Neither in character nor history 
did they inspire their worshipers with lofty 
moral ideals. The polytheistic faiths were 
rooted deeply in racial traditions, and noth- 
ing is more difficult to enlighten and re- 
form than stubborn religious traditionalism. 
Polytheistic faiths preoccupied the ground. 
They were intrenched in temples, in priest- 



A FALSE PSYCHOLOGY 105 

hoods, in altar, in ritual. To change all 
this would require a well-nigh absolute re- 
vision of the world's religious habits and 
customs. It would require an entire new 
conception of God, a substitution of one 
God for the mob of heathen divinities, a 
God of holiness, perfect in wisdom, good- 
ness, and love, a God of universal and 
supreme authority. It would require new 
moral standards of character, of thought, 
and of conduct, not only for individuals 
and society, but for entire civilizations. It 
would require new inspirations, new ideals^ 
new hopes, new moral migrations for the 
entire human race. Surely, it can be no 
wonder that the sophistical Greek mind 
should regard all this as a scheme of 
"foolishness." 

But the work of Jesus of Nazareth is 
history. He depended entirely upon moral 
agencies, upon spiritual forces for the 
achievement of his mission. And he, as 
no other force, and as not all other forces 
combined, has revolutionized the world 
morally. The march of his success was 
along the bloody pathway of persecution 
and of martyrdom, but with his progress 



106 PREMILLENNIALISM 

the gods of ancient polytheism disappeared, 
their altars were deserted, and their tem- 
ples were left to crumble down upon their 
foundations. Such was the marvel of his 
progress that within a few centuries mighty 
Rome itself renounced its polytheism and 
became at least nominally Christian. The 
history is one of enchanting allurement. 
We may no longer dwell upon its features. 
Christ still lives. His moral reign is an 
ever-widening force in the earth and in 
history. Wherever his name is most ex- 
alted, there appear the highest develop- 
ments of personal character, of social 
morality and culture, the sturdiest com- 
mercial integrity, the most wise and hu- 
mane governments. The foreign missions 
established in the name of Christ are not 
only winning whole populations to the stan- 
dards of his cross, but they are furnishing 
such a wealth of new social and moral 
idealism, such new intellectual stimuli, such 
uplifting inspirations and hopes, as rapidly 
to disintegrate and to displace throughout 
the Oriental world the fundamental usages 
and traditions of paganism. Christian 
movements are springing into new and 



A FALSE PSYCHOLOGY 107 

winning life in a day. Nothing perhaps in 
the Christian world to-day is more note- 
worthy than the present great awakening 
throughout the churches to a new and 
widespread interest in missions. Like a 
mighty giant, suddenly awakened by a new 
vision, American Christianity, as never be- 
fore, with a tenfold strength, is planning 
new campaigns for the missionary conquest 
of the world. The kingdom of Jesus Christ 
is not only an ever-widening realm, but in 
all just measurement it can appear as noth- 
ing less than the most divinely significant 
moral movement in the world's history. 

The present age is dominantly scientific, 
constructive, prophetic. The clear vision 
of present-day prophets, both in religion, 
in philosophy, and in business, revels in a 
growing future of blessedness for mankind. 
By an instinct as infallible as gravitation, 
the hard-headed, constructive business 
mind of the age is repelled by the pessi- 
mism and the fallacies of the premillen- 
nial philosophy. 

Obviously, it is wisdom that we should 
give heed to the teachings of history, and 
take some measured account of the total 



108 PREMILLENNIALISM 

and overwhelming development of normal 
Christian thought in the world. The 
world, indeed, presents a drama of moral 
struggle, but it is a struggle ever resulting 
in bettered moral conditions for the race. 
Christian history, as measured by the scale 
of the centuries, presents a great pageant 
of marvelous and optimistic prophetic 
achievement. God is surely, if apparently 
slowly, shaping the world for the scepter 
of his Son. Multiplying signs foretoken a 
new day. The watchman of the morning, 
as he brushes from his locks the dews of 
the night, beholds a far-flung "red of the 
dawn." 

The great war through which we have 
come has been a marvelous revealer of 
altruisms. The choice life of the world 
has not only poured itself out upon the 
altars of sacrifice, but wealth in unprece- 
dented volume has been consecrated to the 
cause of humanity. The most perfectly 
trained surgical and medical skill, the most 
cultured and idealistic young womanhood, 
the most beautiful womanhood — all reen- 
forced by consummate science and by 
every material appliance — have been mo- 



A FALSE PSYCHOLOGY 109 

bilized for humane service. If the war has 
inflicted untold suffering upon the world, 
it has also furnished the occasion for re- 
vealing and exalting a human beneficence 
akin to the divine. 

Universal thought has been challenged 
and much occupied in just the recent time 
by the ideal of a "League of Nations." 
What does it mean? It means a tremen- 
dous drive of altruism on a world-scale. 
Nations in blocks are proposing to forego 
hitherto selfish and cherished interests for 
the sake of forming a safe and secure 
alliance for world-harmony and for the 
universal rights of man. It would be too 
much to expect that the ideal result would 
certainly have been secured by the de- 
liberations of the Paris Council. The 
settled and vicious habits of world- 
diplomacy and politics are not likely to be 
ideally reformed, and to receive a per- 
manent new direction, by a single draft, 
drawn by a council of diverse thinkers, for 
a new constitution of the world. But, 
whatever the weaknesses or the defects of 
this initial attempt, it must be counted as 
a great, a tremendous stride in the direc- 



110 PREMILLENNIALISM 

tion of human progress. A workable and 
abiding world-league may not come in a 
day; but it is on the way, and is sure to 
arrive. The thrones of aristocracy are 
tumbling. We are in the rising era of 
world democracy. Protestant Christianity 
itself, too long and too much divided into 
competitive sects, is seeking as never be- 
fore, and at its very centers of power, to 
reconstitute itself into an organic and work- 
ing unity for its more effective moral con- 
quest of the world. The traffics of impurity 
and intemperance were never so resisted, 
never so hard hit, as to-day. There never 
were so penetrating and analyzing studies 
of social and industrial conditions as now: 
never so firm and general a purpose to in- 
stall social and industrial equities. Great 
and unprecedented philanthropies are mul- 
tiplying upon every hand, and are ever- 
more effectively reaching out to human 
needs. 

The times are socially and morally dy- 
namic. This is the birth-time of forces 
which are to take a new direction of the 
world. The agencies of progress were never 
so numerous, never so effective. Con- 



A FALSE PSYCHOLOGY 111 

tinents and oceans are traversed at express 
speed. The age commands electric and 
instant knowledge of all current human 
movements throughout the world. The 
processes of world education are pervasive 
and rapid as never before. The public 
conscience was never so sensitive to moral 
issues. The alliance of moral forces was 
never so potential. If in the past en- 
vironing shadows have at times made 
somewhat uncertain the courses of human 
history, it is blindness now to doubt that 
new and guiding lights are gathering upon 
all skies. We know that in this very day 
as in no other day prophet eyes do catch a 
glory surely gaining on the shade. The 
conflict between good and evil forces is 
indeed drastic, and may be unhappily pro- 
longed; but civilization is surely migrating 
to its better heritage — a heritage in which 
righteousness, brotherhood, enlightenment, 
and liberty shall assert perpetual sway. 

It may be unhesitatingly admitted that 
the present age, with all its historic op- 
timism, seems one of unprecedented tur- 
moil. It is an age which might well inspire 
new apocalypses. Its oceanic tides of ca- 



112 PREMILLENNIALISM 

tastrophe seem to be smiting all the shore- 
lines of the world. Still, we ought by this 
time to have learned, and to have become 
somewhat prepared for the fact, that God 
has a way of making great use of what we 
call catastrophes in his scheme for the 
moral development of mankind. But just 
because God is supervising the diagram we 
may confidently believe that there never 
was a brighter outlook for the future of the 
race than that which is furnished in the 
present conditions of Christian history. 



CHAPTER VIII 

CHRIST'S KINGDOM: ITS TRUE 
CHARACTER 

The kingdom of Christ is spiritual in its 
ideals and processes. The supreme Agency 
for its realization is the Holy Spirit. 
Christ used the phrase embodying the 
term "kingdom" in a variety of applica- 
tions. It was a term familiarly in use 
among the Jewish people of his time. He 
doubtless used the term as a convenient 
approach to the minds whom he would 
teach. It does not follow, however, that 
his thought in the use of the term was 
limited to the common conception. His 
conception of the kingdom carried distinct, 
new, and large meanings far exceeding the 
thought of his hearers. It is certain that 
he never shared the prevalent thought of 
his day as to the materialistic, or essen- 
tially worldly, character of the kingdom 
itself. His disciples, as we have had occa- 
sion repeatedly to note, all Jews, never 
113 



114 PREMILLENNIALISM 

relaxed during his earthly lifetime their 
conviction that the dominion which their 
Master was about to establish would be of 
a materialistic and spectacular character. 
They had most indefinite and undefined 
ideas as to the modes and measures he 
would employ in installing himself as king. 
The crude conception of the people is illus- 
trated by the very eagerness in which, after 
one of his great miracles, they conspired 
per force to make and to proclaim Christ 
king. 

Christ himself never gave place to this 
view. There would seem possibly some in- 
dication that in the initial days of his 
mission the thought of a temporal kingdom 
may, as a temptation, have thrust itself 
upon him. The significant lesson of the 
scene in the wilderness would seem to be 
in his triumphant and utter rejection of all 
temptation to secure his reign by the sub- 
mission of himself to mercenary or political 
policies. He refused to appeal to the peo- 
ple by the exercise of any spectacular 
power. He would not promote his own 
sovereignty by any gratification of a pop- 
ular wonderlust. He silenced within him- 



CHRIST'S KINGDOM 115 

self all temptation to gain popular recog- 
nition and power by yielding either to the 
clamor of appetite or to the allurements 
of the natural human ambition for power. 
Whatever may have been his consciousness 
of possessing in himself a divine power 
over the forces of nature, Christ never once 
swerved from pursuing the moral and spirit- 
ual method. 

Christ's conception of the kingdom, 
within whatever figure he described it, 
was always spiritual, and not material; 
always a divine reign within the soul 
rather than any enforced authority from 
without. It would be nearly a perfect 
definition of Christ's thought of the king- 
dom if we were to say that it meant to 
him simply God's reign in the human 
heart. 

For a vivid impression of the lesson 
which he intended to teach, Christ doubt- 
less did deal with the familiar phrase 
"kingdom of God" and its kindred phrases, 
in both parabolic and apocalyptic expres- 
sion. Sometimes his application is to the 
heavenly life exclusively, but more often to 
the spiritual estate of his people in the 



116 PREMILLENNIALISM 

present world. He says the coming of the 
kingdom is "without observation/' It is 
like the wind that bloweth. The sound 
thereof can be heard, but whence it cometh 
or whither it goeth, no man can tell. It is 
like leaven in meal. It works gradually 
until the whole body is leavened. It is like 
a small seed cast into the ground. At first 
it seems negligible, but after a time it 
evolves into a full-grown tree. Sometimes 
Christ utters himself in apocalyptic figure. 
Preceding the end, the "Son of man" is to 
appear in the clouds of heaven attended 
by the holy angels. 

Christ spoke often of the actual presence 
of the kingdom when conversing with his 
disciples. He said to his critics, the Phari- 
sees, "If I cast out devils by the Spirit of 
God, then the kingdom of God is come 
unto you." In one of his later conversa- 
tions he said, "Verily I say unto you, 
There be some standing here, which shall 
not taste of death, till they see the Son of 
man coming in his kingdom." "Now after 
that John was put in prison, Jesus came 
into Galilee, preaching the gospel of the 
kingdom of God, and saying, The time is 



CHRIST'S KINGDOM 117 

fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at 
hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel." 
"And he said unto them, Verily I say unto 
you, That there be some of them that stand 
here, which shall not taste of death, till 
they have seen the kingdom of God come 
with power." "So likewise ye, when ye 
shall see these things come to pass, know 
ye that the kingdom of God is nigh at 
hand. Verily I say unto you, This genera- 
tion shall not pass away, till all be ful- 
filled." 

In the very nature of many of his utter- 
ances, Christ can be construed only as 
assigning a moral, a spiritual meaning to 
his kingdom. It is more a matter of the 
heart, of the interior life, than at all a 
question of outwardly imposed authority. 
He said to Pilate: "My kingdom is not of 
this world: if my kingdom were of this 
world, then would my servants fight, that 
I should not be delivered to the Jews: but 
now is my kingdom not from hence." To 
the young man of great native beauty of 
character, whom Jesus loved as he looked 
upon him, and who answered the searching 
moral questions of Christ with conscien- 



118 PREMILLENNIALISM 

tious discreetness, Christ said, "Thou art 
not far from the kingdom of God," "And 
when he was demanded of the Pharisees, 
when the kingdom of God should come, 
he answered them and said, The kingdom 
of God cometh not with observation: 
neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo 
there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is 
within you. 55 Saint Paul tells us that "the 
kingdom of God is not meat and drink; 
but righteousness, and peace, and joy in 
the Holy Spirit." And again to the Corin- 
thian church he says: "Know ye not that 
the unrighteous shall not inherit the king- 
dom of God? Be not deceived: neither 
fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, 
nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves 
with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, 
nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortion- 
ers, shall inherit the kingdom of God." It 
is to be noted that all these expressions 
are to be construed on the basis that the 
kingdom is a present fact and process in 
the world. 

We must measure and interpret all of 
Christ's sayings concerning his kingdom by 
projecting ourselves, so far as possible, into 



CHRIST'S KINGDOM 119 

the very social and psychological atmos- 
pheres through which he moved. This 
may not be an easy task. It is, however, 
evident that Christ as a Teacher must, 
perforce, deal in expressions familiar to 
the common mind. But we may not limit 
his meaning to the measure of the common 
thought. He was dealing with the mo- 
mentous and far-reaching facts of God's 
final purposes for the world. He was 
dealing with these facts from the unob- 
scured viewpoints of his own divine pre- 
science. The common and traditional mind 
had no vision, no measurement, for filling 
Christ's words with the wealth of his 
deeper and eternal meanings. Not even 
Christ himself assumed to know the time 
of the end, which, so far from being within 
his human purview, was reserved alone for 
the decision of the Father. While mis- 
understandings and misconstructions of 
Christ's sayings by those who originally 
heard them were inevitable, it may not be 
an easy task for us now to clear these 
early constructions from their obscurities. 
Our own attempted judgments of some of 
Christ's eschatological statements may also 



120 PREMILLENNIALISM 

be misconceived. It is certain that, so far 
as reported, many of these statements are 
not easy of harmonization. In their study, 
we are evidently dealing with fragmentary 
utterances, rather than with complete and 
full-rounded statements of Christ's eschato- 
logical knowledge. This is a field in which 
we may fittingly and humbly recognize our 
limited understanding of Christ's full 
thought. 

There is clear evidence, however, that 
his disciples must either have misunder- 
stood or misconstrued Christ's teachings 
concerning last things; or that the New 
Testament church was swayed by convic- 
tions for which his teachings did not furnish 
justification. The early church did most 
surely and prevalently look for the near 
return of Christ to end the present order 
of the world. This view was undoubtedly 
held by Christ's immediate apostles. But, 
however derived, history proves it to have 
been a mistal.en view. In the light of our 
best available knowledge, it is difficult to 
see how this view could be indubitably, or 
even probably, deduced from his teaching. 
A preponderance of his words would cer- 



CHRIST'S KINGDOM 121 

tainly seem to indicate a gradual and long 
development of the kingdom before reach- 
ing its historic consummation. 

The kingdom, as he conceived it, is non- 
political and universal in its scope. Its 
effective agencies are purely spiritual. Its 
citizenship is to be made up of the people 
from all nations, including only those who 
choose righteousness. From the human 
level, the foundations of this kingdom rest 
alone in individual hearts in which God 
reigns. Christ committed himself to what 
might seem the audacious proposition of 
morally transforming civilization from the 
basis of regenerated individual lives— lives 
inwardly purified and made luminous by 
the indwelling Spirit of God. By the mul- 
tiplying miracle of such lives, and by their 
creative activities, all civilizations are 
finally to be morally leavened. Not by 
the imposition of outward might and rule, 
but by the vitalizing power of God's Spirit 
in the inner life of men — a Spirit that shall 
be as morally transforming to human na- 
ture as are the influences of spring suns 
and atmospheres upon the ice-bound earth 
— human society, with all its moral agen- 



122 PREMILLENNIALISM 

<*ies and institutions, is to come under the 
divine reign. 

From many standpoints it is difficult to 
see how the premillennial scheme meets the 
fundamental requirements of the spiritual 
kingdom. According to Christ's promise 
it is the mission of the Holy Spirit to take 
of the things of Christ, and to show them 
unto men. The Holy Spirit is to lead the 
church into all the truth. He is to convict 
the world of sin, of righteousness, and of 
judgment. In the great and final com- 
mission which follows Christ's promise of 
the abiding Spirit, there is not the slightest 
hint of any change to take place in Christ's 
methods of administration till the very end 
of the world shall be reached. To use an 
old expression, the Holy Spirit is to be 
"Christ's Executive" until the end of time. 

The spiritual methods of Christianity 
find their responsive counterpart in the 
moral constitution of human nature. Chris- 
tianity ministers in spiritual messages to 
which man's native moral sense responds 
as inevitably as the receiver of wireless 
telegraphy responds to the message sent 
from the initiating source. Man's moral 



CHRIST'S KINGDOM 123 

consciousness is keyed with a definite cer- 
tainty to the message which God's Spirit 
will project upon it. Within every human 
breast there is a moral consciousness which 
reports infallibly in favor of spiritual truth, 
which in spite of all inward revolt of selfish 
motives, calls imperatively upon the will to 
give supreme heed to the spiritual message. 
In the background of this tremendous ap- 
peal there is always enthroned the sov- 
ereignty of the human will. It is always 
possible, however clear the light, or con- 
vincing the message, for the human will to 
say "No" to God. The moral conscious- 
ness is social. It is universal. It holds in 
itself the one ground and hope for all mis- 
sionary enterprise. The heathen nature, 
in regions where the name of the historic 
Christ never has been spoken, wherever the 
spiritual message of his gospel is translated 
to its intelligence, awakens at once, as 
into a spontaneous life, to the quickening 
touch of that message. That spiritual na- 
ture implanted by God in universal hu- 
manity flames at once into unwonted 
expression under the quickening touch of 
new spiritual truth. The very phenomena 



124 PREMILLENNIALISM 

of missions themselves, and marvelously in 
most recent advances, furnish irrefutable 
confirmation of the divine effectiveness of 
a purely spiritual Christianity. Not Pente- 
cost itself, with all the glow of its unique 
phenomena, furnishes more convincing 
proof of the power of the Holy Spirit to 
transform and to inspire the lives of men 
than is demonstrated on many and multi- 
plying fields in the modern missionary 
world. 

Our premillennial friends, however, so far 
as the conversion of the world is concerned, 
insist that the present spiritual order is a 
failure. Christ himself, in any sense ade- 
quate for the evangelization of the race, 
has not as yet manifested himself to the 
world. Their view seems to be that there 
is no final hope for humanity save in the 
personal appearing of our Lord to install 
himself in a visible and irresistible reign 
among men. This view, to say nothing 
about its irreconcilability with the general 
trend of New Testament teaching, flies di- 
rectly in the face of our Lord's last and 
great commission to his church. The very 
psychology of premillennialism in its rela- 



CHRIST'S KINGDOM 125 

tion to these great questions is plainly such 
as to make impossible its acceptance by the 
vast majorities of biblical students. 

Quite aside, however, from the pro forma 
statements of the premillennial view of the 
kingdom, it is difficult to surmount the 
obvious moral objections to the view itself. 
It is far from apparent that any reign of 
Christ's visible person upon the earth, how- 
ever majestic in phenomena, would prove 
effective in the moral transformation of 
mankind. Certainly, it is alien to all 
moral philosophy to assume that Christ 
will secure such transformation by any 
sovereign exercise of his power. He once 
upon the earth performed miracles of won- 
der as outer credentials of his divinity. 
But we have no proof that these miracles 
in themselves resulted in any general moral 
improvement in the characters of their be- 
holders. Indeed, we have Christ's own 
testimony as to the faulty philosophy of 
such a conclusion. When Dives, suffering 
the torments of retribution, besought that 
an angel might be sent to warn his brethren 
upon the earth against his own terrible 
fate, the teaching is that if they would not 



126 PREMILLENNIALISM 

listen to Moses and the prophets, neither 
would they be persuaded though one should 
rise from the dead. Spiritual transforma- 
tion must come from the voluntary sur- 
render of the individual to the enlightening 
power of moral and spiritual appeal. If, 
when he was upon the earth, Christ's mir- 
acles signally failed to subdue and change 
the obdurate hearts of men, then what 
justification is there for expecting that the 
establishing of a visible and majestic throne 
in Jerusalem would result in the moral re- 
newal of the world? 

Such, however, is but one of many sug- 
gested difficulties of the situation. If 
Christ is to reign visibly upon the earth, 
then his throne must have local place and 
habitation. Premillennialism does not 
shrink from this view. By large consent, 
Mount Zion in Jerusalem is to be the visible 
headquarters of the kingdom. But, if so> 
another question arises, namely, How is 
the human family universally to come 
under the direct influence of Christ's 
power? There came a time in Jewish his- 
tory when it was authoritatively directed 
that the temple at Jerusalem should be the 



CHRIST'S KINGDOM 127 

one place in the nation to which all devout 
souls should periodically repair for worship. 
This movement was instituted in the in- 
terests of religious reform. The worship at 
the outlying historic shrines had become 
so invaded and corrupted by idolatrous in- 
fluences and usages as to call for the very 
obliteration of these shrines themselves. 
Thus the entire official worship of the na- 
tion was placed under direction of the tem- 
ple authorities. This requirement was 
measurably practicable because of the 
limited area of Hebrew territory. There 
could be at least an occasional migration 
of the Palestinian Jews to one or more of 
the great religious festivals held at Jeru- 
salem. A moral effect of the change was 
that all devout thought was turned toward 
the temple as to the one most sacred center 
of the world. 

Isaiah idealizes the universal worship 
which shall take place at Jerusalem: "And 
it shall come to pass, that from one new 
moon to another, . . . shall all flesh come 
to worship before me, saith the Lord." 
When the universal religious dominion 
comes to be established at Jerusalem, this 



128 PREMILLENNIALISM 

is his conception: "And they shall bring all 
your brethren for an offering unto the 
Lord out of all nations, upon horses, and 
in chariots, and in litters, and upon mules, 
and upon swift beasts, to my holy moun- 
tain Jerusalem, saith the Lord." Had they 
been in his vision, there can be no doubt 
that the prophet would have included 
among his vehicles express railroad trains, 
automobiles, and aeroplanes. Much allow- 
ance, no doubt, is to be made for the 
figurative character of this description. 
The whole may be but a poetic picture 
vividly setting forth the prophet's concep- 
tion of the religious centrality and glory of 
Jerusalem when the future Messianic king- 
dom of which he dreamed should be fully 
established. Isaiah's limited geographical 
purview may well minify to our thought 
the extravagance of his imagery. But what 
shall be thought of a religious conception 
which can literalize such a passage! 

Now, very well understanding the answer 
which premillennialism would give to the 
illustration which I am about to present, 
I nevertheless offer the illustration. If the 
entire present human family, consisting 



CHRIST'S KINGDOM 129 

probably of not less than 1,700,000,000 of 
persons, were to come under the sway of 
Christ's kingdom, then what sort of pos- 
sibility would there be of all these people 
ever worshiping at one place, either at 
Jerusalem or elsewhere? It is generally 
conceded, I suppose, that even in the mil- 
lennium human beings will still have to 
eat and to sleep. Picture, if we may, the 
vast present population of the earth, as in 
the prophet's picture, all seeking a reli- 
gious pilgrimage to Jerusalem. To say 
nothing of the conceivable difficulties of 
transportation, if pilgrims to the shrine 
could be limited to 100,000 at a time — and 
this would doubtless tax the ordinary hos- 
pitality of the place — and their stay were 
to be limited in each case to a single week, 
even so, it would require more than three 
hundred and twenty-six years of continuous 
pilgrimage to accommodate as many as 
now live upon the earth in a single genera- 
tion. It requires but a moment's reflection 
to convince us of how physically impossible 
it would be, for instance, to assemble for a 
religious festival at one headquarters all 
the populations of a city like New York or 



130 PREMILLENNIALISM 

London within the respective corporate 
limits of these cities. An attempted appli- 
cation of the idea to the entire present 
population of the earth, by its very ab- 
surdity, of course, puts the whole proposi- 
tion instantly out of commission. 

The premillennial teacher, however, will 
tell us that all this kind of calculation is 
quite aside from the requirements of the 
case, and is wholly gratuitous. The in- 
ference is that the millennial population 
of the earth will be infinitesimal as com- 
pared to the present situation. When 
Christ comes he will find faith in the earth 
so rare as to reduce the real number of the 
elect to a comparatively few. The vast 
majorities either shall be destroyed from 
the Lord's presence, or continue to sleep 
in the grave. The first resurrection will 
occur at Christ's coming, when the right- 
eous dead shall be raised, and be reunited 
with the righteous who remain alive upon 
the earth. Premillennialists do not, as a 
rule, ostentatiously presume to announce 
the proximate numbers of the righteous 
who shall remain upon the earth after 
the first resurrection. Presumably, how- 



CHRIST'S KINGDOM 131 

ever, the entire number could be colonized 
in a comparatively small territory, pos- 
sibly in Palestine alone. Perhaps this may 
be the plan. It has already been announced 
that the significance of General Allenby's 
capture of Jerusalem means just this. It 
is a step preparatory to the restoration of 
Palestine as the future home of the Lord's 
elect. From such a standpoint, leaving out 
of consideration all other suggested diffi- 
culties, it might not seem so impracticable 
to assemble the saints in one or more an- 
nual meetings at Jerusalem. 

For the sake of emphasis, however, upon 
some reflections which naturally force 
themselves to the front in this discussion, 
I venture to return to the illustration drawn 
from the present world population. We 
cannot escape a woefully tragic impression 
which is conveyed in the premillennial 
theory of the vast reductions and destruc- 
tions of the present populations of the 
earth as compared with the millennial pe- 
riod. Both a rational philosophy and the 
humane instincts enter gravest protest 
against the proposition. In the light of 
this program, we may ask: What is the 



132 PREMILLENNIALISM 

meaning of the great historic civilizations? 
What is the meaning of all the marvelous 
material progress of the race — of learning, 
philosophy, science, art, poetry, invention, 
social refinements, the ever-growing sense 
of ethical ideals and of human brother- 
hood? What is the meaning of man's 
universal religiousness, of the unnumbered 
worshipers who from numerous and various 
creedal bases have turned their faces de- 
voutly toward God? Is it at all probable, 
is it morally possible, that the great 
Creator through all the ages has willed 
that the human race should innumerably 
propagate itself, developing all its arts, 
sciences, idealisms, worships, and pro- 
phetic hopes, only at last that the whole 
vast drama should close in catastrophe and 
death, with the final result that only the 
barest remnant marked as the "elect" 
should be rescued from the universal ruin? 
What are we to think or conclude con- 
cerning such a plan for the universe? This 
view puts an absolute reversal and nega- 
tion upon all rational philosophy. The 
human reason is absolutely unable from its 
own normal premises and processes to dis- 



CHRIST'S KINGDOM 133 

cern either wisdom or beneficence from 
such an administration of the world. If 
reason has any function, or right of self- 
sovereignty, then this view of human 
destiny puts the thinking mind into a 
mood of unalterable revolt against such 
an ordering of the universe. 

The system hardly can be reviewed 
without suggesting the sense of smugness 
and complacency which it is adapted to 
beget in the minds of its beneficiaries. 
"We are the elect !" "We can, and we 
must, be happy though all the myriads of 
the race aside from ourselves are born to a 
destiny of tragedy, though they must all 
perish in cataclysmic cyclone and flame!" 
This conception is not to be dwelt upon. 
It is essentially horrible. Its logic, in its 
general sweep, is more drastic than Cal- 
vin's Horribile Decretum. The system of 
premillennialism, in many vital respects, 
simply overloads itself. However self- 
confident its adherents, it creates for itself 
the impression of pronouncing a minority 
and misguided utterance as against a whole 
world of reason. It is a doctrine doubtless 
sincerely held by many, but the verdict of 



134 PREMILLENNIALISM 

the world's growing reason increasingly de- 
crees it as fundamentally false. 

Again, the literalism of a local throne at 
Jerusalem, or elsewhere, for the reigning 
Christ, places, so far as we can see, a fatal 
limitation upon Christ's contact with the 
souls of believers. The Holy Spirit can be 
everywhere effectively present. But a 
localized Sovereign, however ineffable his 
presence, cannot be humanly seen and 
communed with at points far distant from 
his habitation. If it should still be said 
that the Holy Spirit conveys the motive 
of Christ to those physically removed 
from his presence, then, it may be asked, 
what advantage for the many will the 
fact of Christ's visible reign in the earth 
have over the present dispensation? The 
Holy Spirit can just as effectively carry 
the message of Christ from his dwelling 
place in the heavens, as to deliver the same 
message from a visible throne located at 
Jerusalem. 

It is never a pleasant task to pronounce 
adverse criticism upon beliefs conscien- 
tiously held. But the obvious truth seems 
to be that premillennialism has so literal- 



CHRIST'S KINGDOM 135 

ized and translocated the coming kingdom 
of Christ into terms of Old Testament 
Scripture as pretty much to have lost 
perspective of the whole situation. Its 
teachers have constructed around them- 
selves a wall of artificial opinions so high 
as to exclude their vision from the ever- 
widening horizons of human thought and 
knowledge. They appear either blind or 
oblivious to the fact, so fully taught 
throughout the New Testament, and espe- 
cially expounded in the Epistle to the 
Hebrews, that the Old Testament loses 
itself in the New, that in Christ the Old 
Testament prophecies have their fulfill- 
ment, and that the Mosaic ritual is dis- 
placed, its shadows having disappeared in 
the glories of the Christian revelation. A 
profound displacement in premillennial 
thought, a fatal displacement of attitude, 
is that its face is turned toward a Jewish 
and outworn past rather than forward to 
the spiritualized day of the Christian fu- 
ture. Judaism is an outgrown system. 
While it ever will hold a sublime historic 
place in God's progressive revelation for 
the world, it has at present neither room 



136 PREMILLENNIALISM 

nor provision in its geographical territory 
for even a temporary rendezvous for the 
constructive Christian forces now at work 
in the world. God's working plans for 
humanity have ever had a forward, and 
not a backward, outlook. 

So far as the salvation of the world is 
concerned, we are now living in God's 
final dispensation — the dispensation of the 
Spirit. The Spirit, with a perfect divine 
functioning, is ever inspiring and guiding 
the processes of Christ's kingdom in the 
earth. This kingdom, while not of the 
world in the sense that its mission is 
worldly, political, mercenary, or temporal 
in its aims, is nevertheless in the world, 
and is increasingly subsidizing and utilizing 
all the normal material agencies of society, 
of education, and of business in furtherance 
of its spiritual ends. The church ranks as 
its chief training-school for character and 
work. In this capacity the church will 
never be superseded. But the church does 
not specifically direct all the interests of 
the kingdom. The spirit of Christianity 
pervasive in the world's thought, giving 
increasingly its own rationale to philos- 



CHRIST'S KINGDOM 137 

ophy, to science, to social ideals, to busi- 
ness, is evermore clearly furnishing the 
moral standards of civilization. If it be 
true that 

"Through the ages one increasing purpose runs 
And the thoughts of men are widened with the proc- 
ess of the suns," 

it is equally true that, under all the 
widening horizons of human advancement, 
the kingdom of Christ shines forth with 
ever-increasing glory and power. The 
divine promise is that its progress never 
will cease until all the kingdoms of the 
earth are taken up into the one kingdom 
of our Lord and of his Christ. 



CHAPTER IX 

COORDINATED FACTORS OF THE 
KINGDOM 

Both the fact and importance of the 
assimilating and correlating functions of 
Christ's spiritual kingdom in the world 
cannot well be over-emphasized. The 
kingdom has a divine capacity for as- 
similating into itself and for coordinating 
to its purposes all the helpful factors of 
civilization. The kingdom of Christ is not 
mechanical; it is biological. It is not de- 
scribed by geometrical lines, nor by any 
merely logical or artificial systems of 
thought. It is not a system. It is a life. 
The historic creeds may have gone far 
toward defining its laws, but the creeds 
do not govern the kingdom. It is itself 
the supreme moral organizer of the world. 
It stands in history, and for all time, for 
God's thought, for God's supreme pur- 
poses for the race. It is the mightiest, the 
most inspirational, the most inventive, 
138 



COORDINATED FACTORS 139 

the most self-appropriating power in the 
world. The world itself has no standing, 
no final meaning, apart from God's king- 
dom among men. 

A divine significance to all this — a sig- 
nificance which the church has been too 
slow to discover — is that the kingdom of 
God has moral uses for all temporal fac- 
tors and agencies which may be made 
legitimately to contribute to human wel- 
fare. It must be conceded that the 
architecture of human society, as now 
developed, is seriously defective at many 
points. Imperfections have arisen from 
many causes. Existing defects in the so- 
cial structure have come from imperfect 
knowledge, from limited vision. The proc- 
esses of evolution, at any stage, do not 
necessarily mean perfection of art. So- 
ciety is a growing organization. Its own 
creations will progressively improve with 
growing experience and knowledge. As 
there enter into its structure better ideals 
and nobler motives, its own character will 
take on increasing luminousness and per- 
fection. Knowledge is one of the supreme 
conditions of attainment. 



140 PREMILLENNIALISM 

A tragical fact is that many of the chief 
defects of the present social order have 
grown out of human viciousness. Men, in 
disturbing numbers, have been wickedly 
selfish, dishonest, and impure in motive 
and conduct. Such often have sought to 
subsidize the very organisms of society for 
evil ends. Many of the most afflictive 
limitations and hurts from which society 
suffers have arisen almost solely from the 
conspiracies of evil minds. 

But, whatever may be its present limi- 
tations or imperfections, or whatever their 
causes, it remains true that human society 
itself is no chance structure in the world. 
It is something which has arisen from fun- 
damental human nature. It has its sources 
in a divine ordination for the human order. 
Man's primary gregarious aptitudes, his 
natural gravitation to social relationships, 
are in themselves prophetic of the moral 
and spiritual brotherhood of mankind — a 
brotherhood which has its primal source 
in the Fatherhood of God. 

In many circles of thought much, and 
well-nigh exclusive, emphasis is placed 
upon man's purely spiritual and worship- 



COORDINATED FACTORS 141 

f ul nature, and this in distinction from his 
intellectual and inventive life, as though 
the only valuation which God sets upon 
man, the only uses which he plans for 
him, are included solely in what we may 
here conveniently designate as the wor- 
shipful and spiritual side alone of human 
nature. As over against this view, it is 
to be fully emphasized that in the ideal 
normal state — the state which is to be 
more and more perfectly realized with the 
growth of the kingdom — all the uses of 
all of man's faculties, and in all relations, 
will be counted as sacred. In the ideal 
spiritual state, man's loyalties to God will 
inspire, through all their entire range, all 
his activities. This very anticipation jus- 
tifies the premise that God purposes, in 
the development of his kingdom, more and 
more perfectly to utilize all the human 
faculties, together with all the legitimate 
products of thought and invention. 

Man's structure is a divine unity. We 
have no right, for the sake of emphasizing 
what we may narrowly judge as his spirit- 
ual worth, to apply a process of dissection 
to man's nature by which we shall cut out 



142 PREMILLENNIALISM 

from his structure such parts as we may 
blindly consider spiritually useless. We 
have no right in the interests of any reli- 
gious theory to eliminate from man, or to 
consign to ignoble ends, any single one of 
his God-given powers. To do this would 
be to mutilate God's workmanship, and to 
commit an iconoclasm against the divine 
ideal. Shakespeare has given us a far better 
picture of the divine ideal of man. He says : 

"What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason! 
how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express 
and admirable! in action, how like an angel! in appre- 
hension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the 
paragon of animals! 

Man's intellectual nature alone is one 
which God ordained for highest achieve- 
ments. That vision must be indeed pit- 
iably mole-eyed which in presence of the 
stupendous creations of man's thought 
could give to his intellectual faculties an 
ignoble rating. God, the supreme Thinker, 
the infinite intellect, has potentially made 
man in his own image. By the exercise of 
his God-given thought faculty man has 
credentialed himself in imperial lordship 
over the world of nature. By the sheer 



COORDINATED FACTORS 143 

exercise of his intellect, he not only traces 
on lightning wing God's processes to the 
remotest immensities, but he is increasingly 
converting the earth on which he lives into 
a vast laboratory for the arts of his civili- 
zation. The human intellect, inquisitorial, 
reflective, inspirational, inventive, creative, 
is ordained of God as one of the chief agen- 
cies for the development of his kingdom in 
the earth. Measured from the standpoint 
of broad vision and calm reason, that reli- 
gious conception would seem indeed to be 
a poor importation into human thought 
which assumes that all the splendid crea- 
tions of man's mind, as in the social 
structure, in government, in history, in 
philosophy, in poetry, in art, in science, 
in invention — that all these and their kind 
are to perish when Christ's kingdom is 
fully disclosed. These are the very agen- 
cies of which Christ will make continuous 
and increasing use in the building of his 
kingdom to its final completion. 

Of course it is the mission of the spiritual 
process to progressively ethicize, illuminate, 
and purify all these agencies, making them 
ever more fit factors for the divine uses. 



144 PREMILLENNIALISM 

This is one of the great meanings of the 
kingdom processes. The Spirit of the 
Kingdom, taking the present factors in 
civilization, emancipating them more and 
more from evil ideals and uses, and trans- 
forming them to the service of moral and 
spiritual ends, will give them a place 
glorious in the completed history. It is a 
mission of the Holy Spirit to transfuse and 
to transform all the present life of man, 
until all the social, educational, and gov- 
ernmental factors of society shall render a 
coordinated and sanctified service toward 
the perfection of God's reign in the earth. 
It must go without the saying that time 
is an element in the working out of God's 
moral plans for the world. In this respect 
it might not seem unreasonable to assume 
that the spiritual order may follow the 
analogy of the material development in 
creation. In preparing for man's coming, 
indefinite aeons of time were employed in 
perfecting the material habitation. It may 
possibly require other indefinite aeons for 
the moral perfecting of the race for whose 
coming so infinite forethought was given. 
Under the divinely quickening action, how- 



COORDINATED FACTORS 145 

ever, of social and moral evolution, now 
clearly within the vision of many ethical 
students, the moral transformation of the 
race may at any time move forward with 
such leaps and bounds as to fill a near 
history with its wonders. 

But this whole view, whether near or far 
of realization, is alien to premillennialism. 
It calls, in case of the human family, for a 
premature, abrupt, and catastrophic term- 
ination of God's cosmic order of the universe. 

Professor W. T. Davison, an eminent 
Christian thinker, has stated a far more 
rational philosophy of the kingdom. He 
says: "The kingdom is coming, not come; 
the church is making, not made. Chris- 
tendom is, in a sense, a word of the past; 
its history may be traced out and written 
down. In a sense it is a word of the 
present, representing a mighty living force 
today. Still more is it a word of the future, 
for as yet we have not been able to see what 
'Christianity 1 fully means. He was right 
who, in answer to the question, 'Is the 
Christian religion "played out"?' replied, 
Tt has not yet been tried.' The disciples of 
the kingdom are, as yet, far from having 



146 PREMILLENNIALISM 

exhausted the resources of the treasure 
house intrusted to their care." 

Professor Borden Parker Bowne was one 
of the most acute Christian minds of this 
or of any other age. He says: "The king- 
dom is a growth, both in our understanding 
of it and in its realization. Our Lord spoke 
of it as a leaven, which was gradually to 
leaven the lump. Again, he described it as 
a seed which should grow up, first the 
blade, then the ear, and after that the 
full corn in the ear. And he even spoke of 
our knowledge of it as something to be 
slowly gained under the tuition of the Holy 
Spirit, whom he would send to guide his 
disciples into the truth. He brought the 
leaven, he planted the seed, he spoke the 
word; but the evolution and the under- 
standing were committed to the ages." 

We cannot bring ourselves to think that 
it is God's purpose by destructive fiat to 
translate the creations of human thought 
as increasingly developed in the civiliza- 
tions into what only can appear as an 
infinite and meaningless waste. This 
would appear a sinister and inexplicable 
ruin of all that seems most prophetic in 



COORDINATED FACTORS 147 

the present intellectual outlook for the 
world. The very conception is scientifi- 
cally irrational. 

Among the most potential of kingdom 
factors is that which we may classify as 
scientific knowledge. In the last resort, 
knowledge is the only credential which en- 
titles to an authoritative opinion. The 
misrule of the world has come largely from 
the sway of dogmas, beliefs, customs, all 
of which have fallen down under the touch 
of scientific analysis. Moral loyalty to 
God needs to be supplemented, illuminated, 
and enriched by a knowledge of God's 
thought. It is really the one mission of 
science to translate God's truth as written 
in nature to man's understanding and for 
man's guidance. The energies of Christ's 
ministry were largely expended in healing 
man's physical ills. The significance of this 
fact seems greatly to have been overlooked 
in subsequent Christian thought. Modern 
scientific knowledge has discovered in a 
wonderful way the divine secret of healing 
man's physical diseases and injuries. Mod- 
ern medicine is a scientific art; surgery is a 
miracle-worker. But the reliability and 



148 PREMILLENNIALISM 

efficiency of medicine and surgery rest en- 
tirely upon knowledge. Not all the piety 
in the world, in the absence of knowledge, 
could substitute the beneficence of science. 
Sacrifices do not stop the ravages of plague, 
incantations do not ward off contagions, 
and even prayer does not furnish a general 
cure for tuberculosis. 

An unscientific world is a superstitious 
world. It is the mission of science to ra- 
tionalize nature. It is its art to subsidize 
all of nature's potencies for ministry to 
human weal. Science has turned nature's 
malarial plague-spots into healthful and 
inhabitable zones. It is exorcising from 
human beliefs and from human fears the 
witches, bogies, hobgoblins, demons, and 
all other uncanny creations of the super- 
stitious imagination. Science transforms 
nature into a garden, and gives to the 
husbandman the secret of multiplying its 
fruitfulness. Science makes the great city 
not only the most sanitary abode for the 
multitudes, but it converts its very marts, 
council houses, art galleries, libraries, mu- 
seums, printing houses, and parks into 
popular exchanges which minister all man- 



COORDINATED FACTORS 149 

ner of convenience and enrichment to the 
life of society. Science discovers and seizes 
upon nature's vast and hidden wealth, and 
lays it down as so much endowment upon 
the altars of human service. It invents 
appliances which infinitely expand the 
areas of human knowledge. It captures 
and subdues to man's uses the mightiest 
forces — thus gridironing the continents 
with railroads, covering the seas with 
merchandise, and binding the whole world 
together into a community of instant 
interintelligence and common interests. 

Science is in its infancy. It is the sworn 
enemy of all intellectual jugglery. It is a 
great promoter of mental honesty. It be- 
gets in the minds of its devotees a supreme 
love of truth for truth's sake. It will move 
forward into an ever-widening career, 
yielding an infinite complexity of knowl- 
edge, of wealth, of service, to life until the 
very earth itself shall become a physical 
paradise. This is all in God's scheme. It 
is his ordination that scientific knowledge 
shall prepare the physical foundations on 
which shall rest Christ's perfected king- 
dom in the earth. 



CHAPTER X 

APOCALYPTIC VALUES 

In the beginning of these meditations we 
went to the "Revelation of St. John" as to 
a chief, indeed, the sole source from whence 
is originally derived the doctrine of millen- 
nialism. Our conclusion is that this book 
in itself presents no authoritative grounds 
or justification for a millennial doctrine. 
This view, we have found, is widely and 
predominantly shared by biblical scholars. 
But such a conclusion is a very different 
thing from the ignoring or setting aside of 
the superlative religious values of the book 
of Revelation itself. The uses of this book 
as a calendar for Adventism, history has 
long since discounted and set aside. 

"He cometh not a king to reign; 
The world's long hope is dim; 
The weary centuries watch in vain 
The clouds of heaven for Him. 

"Death comes, life goes; the asking eye 
And ear are answerless; 
The grave is dumb, the hollow sky 
Is sad with silentness. 
150 



APOCALYPTIC VALUES 151 

"The letter fails, and systems fall, 
And every symbol wanes; 
The Spirit over-brooding all 
Eternal Love remains." 

The supreme value of the Apocalypse is 
in its morally prophetic and spiritual les- 
sons. No devout mind who thoughtfully 
seeks to know the message and genius of 
this book can fail to be stirred to the very 
soul by great reflections. Before taking 
leave of this work, it will be profitable for 
us to return, and to linger for a little amid 
the wonders of Patmos. 

Historically, we know that the book en- 
countered serious obstacles in reaching its 
place in the New Testament canon. It 
received a late acceptance by the Western 
Church, and for a much longer period its 
canonicity was opposed by the Eastern 
Church. Eusebius is on record among its 
adverse critics. Even Jerome, the very 
Father, as we might say, of the authorized 
Latin Scriptures, expresses doubt as to the 
proper canonicity of the book. It is well 
known that Luther, in his earliest edition 
of the New Testament, expresses himself 
as strongly averse to the book of Revela- 



152 PREMILLENNIALISM 

tion. Zwingli, the foremost Swiss Re- 
former, seriously called in question its 
canonical character. Its final acceptance 
in the canon would seem to have been 
largely decided by the urgent pressure of 
the Western Church. 

Personally, I do not feel like making 
overmuch of these canonical difficulties as 
related to the Apocalypse. The book 
stands firm on its feet, a very colossus, 
amid all the surging seas of critical con- 
troversy. If it is rude, even mightily 
rugged, in its literary character, it is still a 
product imperishable as the hills. It sug- 
gests comparison with the Pilgrim's Pro- 
gress. Bunyan's work defies, in many 
ways, accepted literary standards. But it 
is a book which has enthroned itself im- 
perishably in Christian thought. Written 
by a condemned man within the cell of a 
prison-house, it has taken to itself the 
wings of universal publicity, and has been 
translated into all the literary languages of 
the earth. And so, this book of the earlier 
John, written amid the jagged rocks of 
Patmos, with the sound of the surf ever 
beating upon his ears, was born of inspira- 



APOCALYPTIC VALUES 153 

tions which transformed and illumined his 
island prison as by ineffable glories. What- 
ever the older critics may have said, pro 
or con, concerning the fitness of the Apoca- 
lypse for the New Testament canon, the 
book itself has marched down the centuries 
uttering without cease the trumpet-calls 
for a heroic fortitude and a triumphing 
cheer in the souls of tried and troubled 
saints. The book evidences its own in- 
spirations. In times of stormy stress and 
of sore trial it has carried to multitudes a 
message of fortitude and hope which has 
been as a very voice of God from the 
clouds. 

In the vividness of this author's vision 
he is ceaselessly attended by cohorts of 
angels who act for him as intermediary 
messengers between heaven and Patmos. 
The narrow island, designed as the prison- 
house of his doom, was transformed for 
John into a wireless receiving station for 
the moral universe. Think as we may 
about his originality — and it is true that 
we can definitely locate most of the lit- 
erary sources whence his figures are drawn 
— it remains true that, whatever the 



154 PREMILLENNIALISM 

sources of his suggestion, or whatever the 
original uses of these sources, his original- 
ity consists in the fact that he freely 
utilizes for the ends of his own independent 
purposes all these sources. He gives his 
own, and new, meanings to the oldest 
statements. 

In his statements as a teacher of Chris- 
tianity no writer of the New Testament 
exceeds him either in intensity of conviction 
or loyalty of purpose. His letters to the 
"Seven Churches" reveal the most inti- 
mate and interested knowledge of the 
moral conditions of those churches. In 
most impressive terms of speech he deals 
with these churches in a spirit of firmness 
and fidelity worthy of an Old Testament 
prophet. His discernment penetrated to 
the very center of their conditions and 
needs. He was a courageous and faithful 
pastor. It has been well said that the 
book never has been excelled in marvelous 
creations of worshipful pictures. In these 
pictures the very heavens seem laid open 
to view. Under a remarkable variety of 
scene, heroes, saints, and angels are seen 
engaged in acts of highest worship before 



APOCALYPTIC VALUES 155 

the throne. The worshipers bow down be- 
fore Him that sitteth upon the throne, 
worshiping Him that liveth for ever and 
ever, and casting their crowns before the 
throne, they say: "Thou art worthy, O 
Lord, to receive glory and honor and 
power: for thou hast created all things, 
and for thy pleasure they are and were 
created/' The book is a summons to all 
moral intelligences for reverence and wor- 
ship before God. No writings lay greater 
stress upon ethical qualities, none more 
emphasize the virtues of character, none 
make more heroic appeal to the Christian 
conscience, than do the writings of the 
Revelator. 

These appeals, however, are largely set 
forth under forms of high color and of 
vivid imagery. No greater interpretive 
mistake could be made than to attempt 
the reduction of the Revelator's statements 
to literal verbal exactness. He is a poet 
whose imagination revels in all the spaces 
of thought. His word is pictorial. He 
frames his figures against large back- 
grounds. His emotions are intense. He 
feels the thrill of a prophet's ecstasy. The 



156 PREMILLENNIALISM 

lofty monotheism which inspired Isaiah 
with an unshrinking confidence in God's 
righteous and universal sovereignty over 
the earth was fully shared by the Revela- 
tor. God was to him also a God who, in 
the interests of his saints, would finally 
trample down all opposition from their 
presence. 

Rome is the acknowledged mistress of 
the world. Her structure and power seem 
eternal. And Rome is now the great per- 
secutor. But John does not hesitate to 
predict the utter overthrow, the breaking 
to pieces as a potter's vessel, of this ap- 
parently invincible world-power. In his 
vision he foresees clearly that the saints, 
who now seem so helpless, so hopeless, 
shall finally, under God's hand, come forth 
into glorious and eternal triumph. 

The book of Revelation can be under- 
stood only in the light of its purpose. That 
purpose was not to forecast the events of 
universal Christian history. While it has 
its lessons for Christians of all times, its 
immediate and inclusive purpose, so far as 
its author was concerned, was to meet a 
passing and tragic crisis, a crisis which 



APOCALYPTIC VALUES 157 

was passing under his very eye, a very 
part of his own living experience. 

As reviewers of the Apocalypse, then, 
and entirely aside from any factitious doc- 
trines which may have been fastened upon 
the book, we would not do ourselves credit 
if we failed to recognize in its highly 
wrought literature the most imperative 
moral and spiritual values. The book 
especially, and in a wonderful way, extols 
the deific sovereignty of Jesus Christ. 
Whatever may be the preposterous and 
blasphemous claims for deific character as 
set forth by the Roman emperor, this ruler 
is ridiculed, belittled, and made contempt- 
ible when the Apocalyptic writer brings 
him into comparison with Jesus Christ. 
Christ is so divine, his providence so om- 
nipotent, his pledge of eternal life to his 
own people so vivid and sure, as to con- 
vince the most hard-pressed saint that it 
were infinitely better to go to temporary 
martyrdom with Christ than to accept any 
honor whatsoever from the blasphemous 
emperor. 

It is to be acknowledged as a fact 
worthy of emphasis that a belief in the 



158 PREMILLENNIALISM 

soon-coming of Christ to establish irre- 
sistibly his own kingdom in the earth, 
furnished a ground for heroic and sus- 
taining inspirations to multitudes of men 
living in an age that was tottering to its 
fall through the sheer weight of its own 
corruptions. The pagan world of Saint 
Paul's day was godless, corrupt, pessimis- 
tic, hopeless. It was a world little touched 
by the inspirations of any great religious 
faith. Its atmosphere was materialistic, 
making it easy for men to be deniers of 
the gods, scoffers at things sacred, so en- 
slaving themselves to natural appetites as 
to make themselves earthly, sensual, devil- 
ish. To such an age as this the voice of 
the Apocalypse was like a proclamation 
from a new Sinai, declaring that a righteous 
and omnipotent God still keeps his hand 
on this human world. It was a voice an- 
nouncing the direct and supreme claims of 
Jehovah upon the hearts of men. It was a 
divine heralding to an otherwise hopeless 
age, that God would be forever the faithful 
and unfailing Friend of the righteous. This 
kind of apocalyptic faith girded early 
Christianity with an invincible heroism 



APOCALYPTIC VALUES 159 

which has given immortal luster to its, 
history. It was this faith which sustained 
the church of the martyrs through the 
tragic centuries of persecution — persecu- 
tion waged for the very destruction of the 
infant church by the world power of Rome. 
Through that long and nameless ordeal of 
dungeon, sword, and fire the church could 
not have been sustained by a mild and 
quietistic faith. It needed apocalyptic in- 
spirations — inspirations reenforced by the 
pageantries of the skies. 

In the meantime, for us, so far as the 
"Book of Revelation' 5 is concerned, while 
we must firmly and steadily refuse to treat 
it as a time calendar for a belated and 
obsessed school of prophecy, it neverthe- 
less is a book for us to read upon our 
knees, and in a spirit of profound and 
wondering devotion. It is a book that 
sweeps moral immensities. It crowns 
Christ King. It is a matchless dynamo of 
inspiration for souls tossed in the throes 
of moral struggle. It does not make its 
appeals to the indolent, the indifferent, to 
men not responsive to the bugle-calls for 
heroic action. But to the militant right- 



160 PREMILLENNIALISM 

eous, to the man enlisted for the strenuous 
Christian life, the man who at every call 
of duty thrills with the instinct of "going 
over the top/ 5 this book is like an electric 
connection with God's own heart. For all 
saints in spiritual extremity, it is a match- 
less tonic. As no other book in the Bible, 
it illuminates the vision of struggling 
heroes and of dying martyrs. To all such 
it is a blazing beacon that lights the portals 
to an eternal, perfect, and indescribable 
victory. 



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